by Prakash Mana, CEO and co-founder of Cloudbrink
The new shape of remote working is driving a need for secure, effective remote access solutions. Yet most organizations are still struggling with costly, inefficient, and user-unfriendly approaches.
The shift to remote and hybrid work, initially accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has become a lasting transformation in the way businesses operate. While some organizations have pushed for a full return to the office, 91 percent of companies have adopted some form of hybrid work model.
Across the world, businesses have come to accept the hybrid model as the typical approach to work. However, many IT teams are struggling to keep up.
To facilitate large numbers of employees working remotely, new technological solutions are required to enable secure and seamless connectivity to the company network. However, this has become a sticking point for many organizations, who find themselves investing in high-cost solutions, with often underwhelming – sometimes barely functional – results.
Our report, “2025 Trends in Hybrid Working: The Facts Behind Balancing Security and Performance”, has revealed these findings, among others:
Finding the Right Balance in Remote Work Technology.
The ubiquity of hybrid working calls for secure and high-performing remote work solutions. However, this doesn’t always reflect the reality of corporate solutions. Poor security, buggy architecture, and poor usability are just some of the problems employers and employees alike face.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, to learn that one in four organizations plan to completely change or replace their existing remote access solutions – even those with SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) cloud-based architectures in place that combine networking and security. But how do IT teams ensure that their new solutions solve the common problems of poor user experience, performance bottlenecks, and high maintenance demands? The answer could lie in a change in priorities.
The Cost of Security-First Approaches.
It’s only natural for organizations and IT teams to prioritize security. After all, when you have a remote workforce connecting from home or the field, security is often the first thing that springs to mind. But putting security above all else often comes at a cost in terms of performance and user experience. Indeed, 69.3 percent of IT leaders admit that security considerations have negatively impacted performance elsewhere.
But the problems don’t end there. Many solutions can be complex and cumbersome, making it difficult for IT teams to identify and fix issues. In our survey, 78.5 percent of respondents admitted their existing remote access architecture was difficult to manage and support. Yet there is a reluctance to adopt simpler, more scalable solutions for fear of losing that all-important level of security. Instead, common efforts to tackle these problems focus on short-term fixes instead of long-term transformations, such as upgrading user devices, replacing applications, and increasing bandwidth. But none of these things can make up for the fact that the remote access solution in place is less than ideal.
Rather than using quick fixes that plague SASE and VPN architectures, an alternative approach is worth considering.
Rethinking Remote Access: Alternative Solutions to Common Issues.
One such alternative is Personal SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), which offers increased reliability and performance alongside rigid security and scalability. And because it can be used with broadband connections and not just leased line networks, it is also cost-effective.
Similarly, Personal SASE is a software solution that sits on the user’s device and offers increased security, low latency, and complete network oversight. It also provides Zero Trust Network Access, ensuring only approved applications and activities are permitted.
These types of solutions provide a more streamlined approach to secure, reliable remote access while reducing the demands — and therefore the costs — placed upon IT teams.
In one instance, a Cloudbrink customer was able to migrate 100 percent of their workforce to Personal SASE and redeploy 50 percent of their IT support team to strategic security initiatives within three weeks. While this alone sounds impressive, these approaches really shine in remote networks such as home, hotel, or coffee shops where packet loss issues are significant. One CloudBrink client found that packet loss slowed down their network connections so much that they were losing as much as $3k per user per year waiting for downloads.
If you consider that average packet loss in the U.S. is 1.8%, while optimal performance — achieved through more efficient remote access architectures — is less than 0.005%, then it becomes clear that cases like this are not outliers but the norm. And if the norm is not good enough, then a widespread transformation in remote access technology is needed.
Why Organizations Resist Change Despite Known Challenges.
Almost every IT professional accepts that better remote access solutions are needed, yet most organizations continue to struggle with — and invest in — approaches that, though established, are buggy, bloated, and burdensome. This leads to reactive spending as organizations attempt to fight their way into the brave new world of post-pandemic hybrid working, all of which is a false economy, causing additional work, driving unnecessary costs, and storing up problems for the future.
As the nature of work continues to evolve, it’s time to rethink how we do remote access. Instead of wasting resources on ineffective solutions, organizations should make smart investments that prioritize performance, security, and optimized application delivery — such as Personal SD-WAN and Personal SASE.
Prakash Mana is a seasoned technology executive with over 25 years of industry experience. As CEO and co-founder of Cloudbrink, Prakash has a strong track record of success, having served as CPO and CTO at Pulse Secure and held responsibilities for Citrix’s NetScaler security gateway business. Prakash is recognized for his leadership in cybersecurity and networking particularly as it applies to remote and hybrid work technology, where he focuses on applying his business and technical expertise to innovate solutions that provide an in-office experience to the remote worker.