How remote work forced the enterprise’s hand at cybersecurity.

The last 18 months proved to be quite challenging for businesses both large and small. But if we spotlight enterprises, the drastic changes introduced due to remote workforces caused a paradigm shift in the way work is protected. 

Knowledge workers have had a profound impact on productivity across the board. However, their needs presented challenges to security departments tasked with securing work and ensuring that any new approaches or solutions didn’t stifle productivity in the process. 

Cloud adoption skyrocketed to enable the distributed workforce. However, in the process, the attack surface for enterprises quickly expanded, leaving security teams with not only a trove of new cloud-based applications to oversee but a distributed workforce that operates on the network’s edge. While it indeed presented challenges, it forced many enterprises to rethink their approaches to cybersecurity. 

“COVID changed the way security professionals think and approach their challenges in meaningful ways,” says Menlo Security Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Poornima Debolle. Organizations have become accustomed to working a certain way for decades. However, today, employees spend 75 percent of their time in a browser, DeBolle says, quoting a recent Google study that points to the explosion of work conducted in Internet browsers and cloud SaaS application usage. 

What does she advise security leaders today? “Find use cases that benefit your cloud journey the most,” DeBolle says. 

In the full video interview below, Dark Reading Contributing Editor Terry Sweeney chats with DeBolle, who breaks down the use cases that security professionals should focus on to protect productivity while enabling the business today.