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their applications more available through the cloud and adopted more cloud services to enable employees to work from home .
However , the ability to monitor employees ’ web access and block certain activities has become more difficult and there is no longer the social pressure of being in the office . The number of targeted attacks being sent to users via email channels are increasing because they ' re expecting more information that way .
How complex is today ' s environment given that many workforces are now hybrid ?
Pre-pandemic , we would optimize for the workplace . We had 80 % of employees in the office and 20 % remote . Then , as employees were sent to work from home , the bulk of the workforce became remote and organizations adopted a separate security stack for remote people .
Now we ' re working in a scenario where workforces are hybrid , which means managing two separate large environments . If you don ’ t have the same level of efficacy across both , then that ' s where the attacker is going to go . If you don ' t have the same level of visibility , that ' s where problems are going to manifest . In a hybrid world , you need to be able to operate in a way that provides universal control , visibility and , importantly , efficacy across both environments .
What does your data show about the steps that companies and employees have taken to protect against the risks of hybrid work environments ?
Some organizations were well prepared for the transition because they were already on a transformation journey . They wanted to be more agile and productive , with employees empowered by technology .
Organizations that weren ' t prepared were the ones that struggled most . Those who thought that Digital Transformation was something trendy that didn ' t really apply to them moved slowly and then suddenly had to scramble .
And those two different starting positions defined responses as some organizations scrambled to implement new cloud technologies to keep the business operating , while others simply took what they were already doing and expanded it .
The common thread across both camps was increased application of cloud-native security . Many technologies that saw organizations through the pandemic originated in the cloud , though extending enterprise security or on-premises security into the cloud is harder than many realize . We ' ve seen massive growth in the use of cloud access security brokers and cloud web security gateways , as well as data protection technologies .
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