Hybrid work is here to stay. According to research by Accenture, nearly 60% of employees have been working in a hybrid model over the past two years, and 83% identify hybrid work as being optimal in the future.1 Forward-thinking organizations recognize the need to accommodate employees in a hybrid environment as workers redefine work-life balance and flexibility in their jobs.
Focusing on cyber resiliency is essential to facilitating the hybrid work model. Everyone—business leaders, IT teams and employees—must be able to trust that they are not increasing the risk of security breaches and downtime by enabling hybrid work. This article looks at five key factors in a cyber-resilient technology portfolio to support, empower and secure the workplace of the future and make hybrid work a major contributor to corporate culture and business success.
Factor No. 1: Secure your data with built-in protection. As attackers become more creative, it is more important than ever to protect your endpoints with built-in protections—both below and above the operating system level. The growing frequency of BIOS-specific attacks, for example, means organizations need sophisticated ways to protect their systems and verify that they have not been compromised. An excellent example of built-in protection is the combination of VMware Carbon Black Audit and Remediation and Dell Technologies SafeBIOS, an integrated solution that lets IT monitor, manage and remediate compromises resulting from BIOS tampering. Another benefit of built-in protection is that it simplifies deployment and management for your IT teams. Many IT professionals are also remote, so technology portfolios that empower and simplify remote management, maintenance and security are essential in the hybrid work era.
Factor No. 2: Improve the performance and security of remote and hybrid workers with virtual desktop infrastructure. VDI is well suited to empower and secure the hybrid workforce. From a security standpoint, it enables the organization to control sensitive information inside the corporate firewall and keep it secure at all endpoints. This limits the risk that local, non-business applications by a user, or even someone in a user’s family, could cause a breach. VDI also gives organizations a lot of flexibility in enabling multiple users to share the same hardware, making it simpler, more secure and less costly to support a resilient, seamless experience wherever the user is located. From a performance standpoint, today’s VDI solutions from VMware and Dell deliver any level of performance, even those required by the most demanding, data-driven and graphic-intensive applications. Finally, VDI enables the organization to leverage existing storage, network and computing resources to keep costs under control.
Factor No. 3: Extend security and compliance to employees working outside of the office with an integrated cyber-resilient portfolio. One of the biggest challenges in managing security for the hybrid workplace is the excessive number of disconnected point tools. As noted in an Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) brief, “This strategy is ineffective, inefficient and increases cyber-risk.”2 By consolidating multiple endpoint security capabilities, organizations can centralize vital cyber-resiliency capabilities and take advantage of a simpler, more automated approach to managing security and compliance. For example, VMware Carbon Black allows IT and security teams to centralize management and visibility for multiple security functions—including next-generation antivirus, endpoint detection and response, managed detection, and audit and remediation.
Factor No. 4: Eliminate bottlenecks to reduce the strain on corporate and home networks, limiting downtime and securing business-critical apps. Network performance and security are essential to keeping employees productive and preventing organizations from losing customers and goodwill caused by downtime. The challenges are increasing in the hybrid work era, particularly with the expansion of edge and cloud computing. According to ESG, “To better support highly distributed, modern environments, organizations are becoming increasingly aware of the need to converge network and security functionality.”3 This challenge is addressed by SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions. With SD-WAN and SASE technologies, organizations can run complex workloads without worrying about unreliable connections, taking advantage of application awareness to recognize and secure business-critical applications.
Factor No. 5: Implement automation, hybrid cloud and consumption-based models to support the hybrid workforce, leveraging modern cybersecurity innovations such as zero trust architectures and intrinsic security. With a portfolio of cyber-resilient solutions and services from Dell and VMware, organizations can deliver end-to-end cybersecurity and cyber resiliency from the data center to the edge to the cloud to support today’s hybrid workplace. Unique benefits from the Dell-VMware partnership allow you to:
- Create a flexible management experience across all your clouds with familiar tools.
- Rapidly deploy an on-premises, automated infrastructure that can scale with a smaller on-site IT team.
- Deliver hybrid cloud resources as a service with a flexible on-demand consumption model.
- Deploy intrinsic security protections, such as a zero trust architecture, to strengthen cyber resiliency for your hybrid workforce.
Taking the next step
When it comes to transforming the vision of hybrid work into reality, there’s no room for compromise on cyber resiliency. That’s why it is essential to work with partners that offer a full portfolio of products and services to provide an end-to-end framework. Look for solutions that offer intrinsic security to all workers at all locations, extending from data center to edge to hybrid cloud. Please visit Dell Technologies to learn more about how your organization can maximize cyber resiliency to support your most strategic hybrid work initiatives.
1 “The Future of Work: Productive Anywhere,” Accenture, 2021
2 “ESG Brief: Cybersecurity Vendor Consolidation Efforts,” Enterprise Strategy Group, Aug. 5, 2020
3 “Dell Technologies: The Foundation for a Flexible SASE Journey,” Enterprise Strategy Group, April 2021
