Services Firms Facing New Networking Challenges

Services firms are grappling with significant new networking and security challenges as they increasingly transition towards digital-first operations, according to The State of Network Security in Business and Professional Services, a report commissioned by Aryaka.

The business services sector is evolving to accommodate modern business needs. Legal, consulting, HR, property management, and other services companies are delivering solutions through the cloud and ramping up SaaS adoption to support remote and hybrid work. These decentralized, complex, cloud-based environments are harder to secure than traditional environments, introducing a range of new attack surfaces. Resource-constrained IT teams are struggling to protect apps and infrastructure in these settings, which can grow quickly in scale.

SaaS Performance and Security Demands Vex Strained IT Teams

Services organizations are looking to modernize their networks to support remote and hybrid work while ensuring consistent service quality across cloud-native applications and client-facing platforms. Survey respondents said their top strategic networking and security priority was improving application and SaaS performance (72%), followed by gaining network and security observability (68%) and simplifying operations and reducing IT burden (48%). These priorities underscore that the sector is optimizing for user experience and operational agility.

But day-to-day networking and security hurdles are making it difficult to accomplish these strategic goals. Overall, complexity and staffing gaps have created blind spots for services firms that affect both performance and protection. When asked about top networking and security challenges, respondents identified the following:

  • Securing SaaS and public cloud apps (66%)
  • Managing remote user access and latency (58%)
  • Operating with limited internal IT staff (54%)
  • Managing too many vendors/support contracts (46%)
  • Gaps in performance and threat visibility (43%)

To make matters worse, organizations in the sector are failing to prioritize edge security. Despite the rise of SaaS and remote work, only 38% of business services leaders view edge security as "mission-critical." While cloud maturity is rising, edge-layer protections (such as Zero Trust Network Access, Secure Web Gateway, and Next-Generation Firewall technologies) are often fragmented or under-deployed.

Unified SASE Simplifies Networking and Security Efforts

Services organizations are moving to solve these network performance and security issues by deploying Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions, with 44% of respondents planning to adopt SASE in the next 12 months. These companies hope to unify security and network policy enforcement, improve user experience across SaaS and cloud, and reduce burden on internal IT teams.

"Professional services firms are under immense pressure to deliver seamless digital experiences while protecting an extremely sophisticated and decentralized environment. This survey confirms what we're hearing from the market every day: IT teams are overwhelmed by SaaS technology sprawl, latency issues, and managing disparate security solutions," said Ken Rutsky, CMO, Aryaka.

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Services Firms Facing New Networking Challenges

Services firms are grappling with significant new networking and security challenges as they increasingly transition towards digital-first operations, according to The State of Network Security in Business and Professional Services, a report commissioned by Aryaka.

The business services sector is evolving to accommodate modern business needs. Legal, consulting, HR, property management, and other services companies are delivering solutions through the cloud and ramping up SaaS adoption to support remote and hybrid work. These decentralized, complex, cloud-based environments are harder to secure than traditional environments, introducing a range of new attack surfaces. Resource-constrained IT teams are struggling to protect apps and infrastructure in these settings, which can grow quickly in scale.

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Services organizations are looking to modernize their networks to support remote and hybrid work while ensuring consistent service quality across cloud-native applications and client-facing platforms. Survey respondents said their top strategic networking and security priority was improving application and SaaS performance (72%), followed by gaining network and security observability (68%) and simplifying operations and reducing IT burden (48%). These priorities underscore that the sector is optimizing for user experience and operational agility.

But day-to-day networking and security hurdles are making it difficult to accomplish these strategic goals. Overall, complexity and staffing gaps have created blind spots for services firms that affect both performance and protection. When asked about top networking and security challenges, respondents identified the following:

  • Securing SaaS and public cloud apps (66%)
  • Managing remote user access and latency (58%)
  • Operating with limited internal IT staff (54%)
  • Managing too many vendors/support contracts (46%)
  • Gaps in performance and threat visibility (43%)

To make matters worse, organizations in the sector are failing to prioritize edge security. Despite the rise of SaaS and remote work, only 38% of business services leaders view edge security as "mission-critical." While cloud maturity is rising, edge-layer protections (such as Zero Trust Network Access, Secure Web Gateway, and Next-Generation Firewall technologies) are often fragmented or under-deployed.

Unified SASE Simplifies Networking and Security Efforts

Services organizations are moving to solve these network performance and security issues by deploying Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions, with 44% of respondents planning to adopt SASE in the next 12 months. These companies hope to unify security and network policy enforcement, improve user experience across SaaS and cloud, and reduce burden on internal IT teams.

"Professional services firms are under immense pressure to deliver seamless digital experiences while protecting an extremely sophisticated and decentralized environment. This survey confirms what we're hearing from the market every day: IT teams are overwhelmed by SaaS technology sprawl, latency issues, and managing disparate security solutions," said Ken Rutsky, CMO, Aryaka.

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