Hybrid work has moved beyond a passing trend − it's now an established standard in the modern workplace. And as the employment landscape matures, IT departments are coming under increasing and sustained pressure to support, secure and optimise flexible work environments across the globe.
In the US, despite attempts by president Donald Trump to limit remote work in the federal sector, many private companies continue to embrace hybrid and remote models to attract and retain top talent.
Flexibility has become a cornerstone of job satisfaction, employee well-being and workforce resilience.
Hybrid work − where employees alternate between office and remote environments − has been shown to improve work-life balance and sustain or even boost productivity.
In South Africa, for instance, a recent Michael Page survey revealed that 63% of professionals reported higher productivity working from home, with 31% seeing no decline in performance.
Pnet’s 2024 Job Market Trends Report confirmed growing demand for remote-friendly roles across industries.
However, this flexibility introduces new risks and complexities, as IT teams must now enable 24/7 access to systems across a heterogeneous mix of devices, locations and networks.
IT teams must now enable 24/7 access to systems across a heterogeneous mix of devices, locations and networks.
This decentralisation increases attack surfaces, elevating the risk posed by insecure home setups, unmanaged personal devices and reliance on public networks.
This is the “double-edged sword” of productivity versus risk.
Focusing on risk, the rise of shadow IT − where employees use unauthorised applications and hardware − creates blind spots in an organisation’s security posture. These gaps reduce visibility and increase the risk of data loss or cyber intrusion.
Compliance is another growing concern. In South Africa, ensuring adherence to POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act) becomes more complicated as sensitive data is accessed and shared from outside secure office environments.
The same holds true globally, with companies needing to navigate a maze of many jurisdiction-specific regulations across remote endpoints.
As employees work from diverse and often unsecured environments, insider threats − both accidental and intentional − are harder to detect. Ensuring that employees manage sensitive data in line with corporate policy is now as much a behavioural challenge as it is a technical one.
This is leading to the formulation or a range of new priorities for distributed IT ecosystems, with modern IT teams refocusing their strategies around several critical pillars.
The first is the need to secure endpoints, such as laptops and smartphones used by remote workers, using advanced endpoint detection and response tools.
Then there is the adoption of a zero-trust architecture (ZTA), which assumes no implicit trust and continuously verifies every access request as though it originates from an untrusted network.
Another key pillar is the adoption of identity and access management systems that incorporate multi-factor authentication, biometrics and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven adaptive access controls.
These systems dynamically adjust user permissions based on many contextual factors. These include location, device health, time of access and others, enhancing both security and the user experience.
Many organisations are currently migrating to cloud-native security models, such as secure access service edge (SASE), which integrates networking and security into a single cloud-delivered service that secures user access to cloud and on-premises applications alike.
Today, it is widely accepted that manual responses to security-related incidents are no longer sufficient. AI and automation are becoming essential to cyber security operations in the face of increasingly sophisticated attacks.
AI-powered tools can analyse vast datasets in real-time to detect anomalies and predict attacks before they occur. And they are able to automate routine responses to known threats, allowing human teams to focus on strategic incidents.
Importantly, AI tools are capable of enhancing behavioural analytics to flag suspicious user activity, contributing to both threat prevention and insider threat detection.
In 2025, we're also seeing growth in the use of extended detection and response (XDR) systems, which play a crucial role in modern cyber security by unifying and correlating threat detection across multiple domains − including endpoints, networks, servers, cloud environments and e-mail systems.
Unlike traditional tools that operate in silos, XDR delivers a consolidated view of security data, enabling faster threat identification and a more coordinated response.
This integrated approach helps security teams detect complex, multi-vector attacks that might otherwise go unnoticed when using disconnected security tools.
According to Microsoft, organisations adopting XDR can automate cyber threat hunting and optimise the proactive search for unknown or undetected threats across an organisation’s entire security environment.
XDR achieves this by leveraging AI and machine learning to prioritise threats, reduce false positives and suggest or initiate appropriate remediation steps.
This enhances organisational efficiency by reducing alert fatigue and automating response actions.
As organisations embrace hybrid work and cloud-first strategies, XDR provides the scalable, real-time protection needed to monitor diverse environments − empowering IT teams to maintain resilience and continuity in an increasingly complex threat landscape.
The hybrid workforce is here to stay, and with it comes a permanent reshaping of enterprise IT strategy. Success will depend on how effectively organisations prepare for security breaches that will happen and build ultimate resilience accordingly.
Success will also depend on how effectively organisations can blend flexibility with security, manage complexity without disrupting productivity and leverage next-generation tools from AI and ZTA, to SASE and XDR.
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