Hybrid work security is more than just a buzzword. It has become essential to the world’s largest and most successful businesses.

As more businesses cement their remote work models, the boundaries of the traditional office have expanded, effectively turning every home into a potential office space. This shift necessitates a new approach to cybersecurity—one that protects data wherever it resides.

Challenges in Hybrid Work Security

In hybrid work security, there are three key challenges to address.

• It's critical to secure both cloud-based and internal private web applications. With the increasing trend of remote work and the use of multiple devices, employees often access corporate resources from various locations, making it crucial to have robust measures in place to safeguard against potential threat actors and unauthorized access.
• In today's Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) workforce, ensuring robust threat protection is essential. Malware and data breaches can come in many shapes and forms and protecting employees from a myriad of emerging threats, such as sophisticated zero-day or phishing attacks, is a chief concern.
• And lastly, data security must be prioritized for both corporate and BYOD devices to maintain a secure environment. Data security teams must unify policy coverage across the different channels of egress, including email, cloud, web, network and endpoint, and ensure visibility no matter the device that’s being used.

Best Practices for Hybrid Workplace Cybersecurity

Securing your hybrid workforce requires proactive measures and establishing security awareness is the first step. For employees, this includes being aware of potential threats, following established protocols, and actively participating in security awareness training programs.

Technology also plays a crucial role. First, in ensuring the security of remote connections via Zero Trust. The framework, where trust is never assumed and always verified, can provide an additional layer of protection against account compromise.

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is a technology that enables organizations to authenticate and authorize users before granting access to resources, making it an effective solution for securing remote connections to internal resources.

Additionally, applying uniform data security policies across all attack surfaces—cloud, corporate devices, and BYOD—is essential. Data Security Everywhere, the integration between Forcepoint DLP and Forcepoint ONE SSE, helps organizations achieve this. Security teams can set policies once and quickly apply them wherever employees are working with sensitive data, including cloud applications like Office 365.

Future of Hybrid Work Security: Visionary Perspective

Looking toward the future, the adoption of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is expected to rise steadily.

SASE is an innovative approach that combines edge security functions with networking capabilities, providing comprehensive support for the dynamic secure access needs of organizations. By adopting a unified approach to security, organizations can simplify the task of securing their hybrid workforce, making it easier to manage and more effective in safeguarding critical assets and data.

As businesses continue to evolve and embrace digital transformation, the implementation of SASE offers a scalable and adaptable solution to address the ever-changing hybrid work security landscape.

Hybrid Work Security with Forcepoint

The shift to hybrid work is here to stay, bringing with it new challenges in data security.

As we embrace this change, understanding and implementing best practices in hybrid work security becomes a business imperative. At Forcepoint, we're committed to helping you navigate this journey with solutions that secure data everywhere it resides. Explore our data security suite today to empower your hybrid workforce with the protection they need.