Summary: Explore key hybrid work security challenges and best practices to protect data, devices, and networks in flexible, cloud-driven workforce environments.
The remote workforce was a mostly pandemic-induced necessity, which didn’t take long to prove its convenience. First started as a demand to secure business continuity by transferring all possible tasks to remote employees’ homes, today, remote work has evolved—not just as a temporary precaution, but as a flexible model that remains relevant well beyond the pandemic.
The hybrid working model has brought dynamics to a desk-pinned office, giving hybrid work environments more flexibility to manage a hybrid workforce and expand possibilities of human resources and skilled talents from all over the world.
Remote work pioneered the establishment of hybrid work policies from small businesses to large enterprises, allowing employees to work from anywhere, enabling employers to downsize the number of static workplaces in the office space, saving all parties a significant part of the time and financial resources.
Even though remote work is gaining a positive meaning and is a modern approach for a virtual office, it still carries the weight of challenges related to hybrid work security, privacy, and business protection issues. According to the Microsoft Digital Defense Report, cybercriminals perform a significant number of ransomware, malware, or phishing attacks. Ransomware attacks increased by 2.75 times year-over-year in 2024, although the percentage of attacks reaching the encryption stage has decreased more than threefold over the past two years due to improved defenses.
Before hybrid work arrangements became a new custom in most corporate routines, companies operated solely within their own established on-site infrastructure. It resembles a dome-like environment where company resources, data, and employees function strictly under predefined policies and security requirements supervised by an organization. However, remote work expanded the definition of company perimeter and security measures naturally fractured due to higher exposure to internal and external threats.
As much as in-office employees, remote workers help secure day-to-day business operations and are indispensable company assets. Yet, adapting to home-office environments comes with limitations. Organizations cannot independently ensure network and endpoint security with a hybrid workforce in action. A company is also much more reliable in trusting endpoints trying to gain secure access to organizational resources, as identities or devices can be compromised.
Moreover, most company perimeters are based on outdated IT infrastructure incapable of keeping up with increasing hybrid work security needs and supporting ad-hoc requirements of evolving businesses. Lack of preparation opens doors for hostile actors, which often results in data leaks or even financial and reputational losses rising every year.
Data breaches are among the most concerning security threats despite an organization's size and market, as they may affect the business, employees, and, most importantly, users and customers of the company.
Impressive numbers collected by Acronis, a data security vendor, confirm that attackers are always looking for a gap to sneak in. As stated in the report, 70% of organizations experienced at least one cyber-attack in the past year, and nearly half reported being targeted by phishing attacks specifically. Furthermore, 30% of companies faced ransomware attacks in 2024, highlighting the persistent threats for businesses of all sizes.
Security threats get triggered by a simple human error or a malicious attempt to access and leak sensitive data. For instance, not working in a dedicated place during working hours but switching workspaces between an office, a coffee shop, and home can lead to undesired events:
According to a Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR), 74% of breaches involved the human element in 2024, including social engineering attacks, errors, or misuse. Companies are responsible for implementing practical solutions to strengthen organizational cybersecurity to overcome this.
The hybrid work model brings another challenge to organizations—how will all hybrid workers access an enterprise network to perform their daily tasks without putting company data security at risk?
Day-to-day operations require employees to access data and share files, connect to on-site IoT devices, and access another user’s device in case of need for technical support. However, without efficient upgrades, legacy infrastructure performance and capacity cannot guarantee sufficient business operation continuity. It also puts more workload on admins responsible for ensuring that users within a company network can be trusted to avoid any potential threats, so security measures must increase, too.
An explicit trust in endpoints accessing a company network with a once-granted access is among the most significant security vulnerabilities. Remote means there is no confidence in how and who operates within the network. Manual monitoring of user activities is time-consuming, especially when it takes many users, leading to another human error.
Little knowledge of who’s actually behind a screen is a concern—but it’s only part of the bigger picture. Mobile device management remains a critical challenge for remote and hybrid work environments.
Employees commonly use laptops, smartphones, and tablets to access corporate resources. While this flexibility improves convenience and reduces hardware costs, it blurs the lines between personal and professional device use. As a result, both unmanaged personal devices and misused work devices significantly increase exposure to risks like malware, compromised websites, and insecure configurations.
Unfiltered browsing, risky downloads, and missing security controls—such as authentication, encryption, and regular updates—amplify the likelihood of data breaches. And the numbers back it up: according to Bitdefender’s 2023 findings, 70% of cybersecurity incidents stemmed from unmanaged devices. As hybrid work becomes the norm again, attackers are shifting their focus to less controlled environments.
That’s why it’s time to rethink endpoint protection strategies—starting with the browser.
NordLayer’s Enterprise Browser is built for the realities of hybrid and remote teams. It offers secure, isolated access to company resources, shields users from online threats, and minimizes data leakage across any device or location. Join the waitlist and be among the first to experience a smarter, safer way to access the web.
Data breach events escalate quickly, so a company must implement the most crucial security measures to protect valuable information. Unprotected devices with unconfirmed users signal the importance of identity management. Insufficient security policies and limitations of on-site legacy perimeter infrastructure cannot ensure the performance quality of a business hybrid workforce, creating a counterproductive environment for IT administrators.
Improving security within corporate networks requires upgrades and solutions dedicated to mitigating security threats, improving efficiency over the whole company infrastructure, and establishing a mindful approach to protecting critical data. To secure a hybrid workplace model, we prepared a list of best practices to achieve it.
Hybrid work is about leaving a dedicated company network and accessing resources via public and home-based networks that carry critical security threats. Establishing connectivity via a business VPN helps create secure access for remote workers.
When employees aren’t in the office, companies need new ways to verify identity and ensure secure access to corporate networks. A Zero Trust approach helps here. It follows the principle: “Trust none, verify all.” This model relies on multifactor authentication to grant access to corporate devices and resources. It also involves segmenting the network and setting strict access controls.
Physical infrastructure is limited by expensive hardware and on-site maintenance—the complete opposite of an agile, easy-to-deploy, and upgrade setup. Therefore, transitioning to cloud environments is a go-to solution for efficiency and sustainability. Modern cybersecurity Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture levels everything to a virtual level that is easier to manage and scale on demand.
NordLayer’s hybrid workforce security solution seamlessly transitions to cloud-first infrastructure with built-in protection.
Hybrid work environments result in many requests, endpoints, and incidents that eventually become hard to manage and require more time and work resources from IT admins. Increasing pressure leaves more space for human error, so automatization is one of the key considerations to simplifying monitoring operations and detecting deviations in real-time.
Growing awareness of security importance among employees is as essential as any tool or software that helps create a hard-to-penetrate security grid over a company. Employees may not be aware of potential security threats that lurk behind office walls. Therefore, training and building knowledge of personal responsibility and the relevance of applied security measures are crucial for every business. This awareness is especially important in the case of secure hybrid work, where traditional protections are limited. Hybrid work security solutions can only be effective if people understand how to use them and why they matter.
Ensuring data security and organizational well-being in hybrid environments is the responsibility of both the company and employees. Desired results are much easier to achieve if the right network management tools and solutions are in place.
At NordLayer, we’ve experienced the same challenges every modern business faces when adapting to a hybrid workforce, and that firsthand experience shaped our solution. We built secure network access tools specifically to address the realities of today’s flexible work models.
Our cloud services are built on a layered security architecture and guided by the principles of SASE and Zero Trust. Moreover, to support secure access for a hybrid workforce, NordLayer provides key tools like Business VPN, encrypted data traffic, and robust identity verification, combining multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometrics, and Single Sign-On (SSO) from leading providers. These features simplify Zero Trust adoption across all corporate devices and networks.
To overcome common data access challenges, our Cloud LAN solution enables secure hybrid work with Site-to-Site connections, file sharing, and remote device control. Security teams can manage and monitor everything via a centralized Control Panel—allowing them to detect compliance issues, spot rooted devices, and prevent security incidents before they spread.
NordLayer makes it easy to start, combine, and scale a flexible remote network security setup. By supporting secure access and data security, we help businesses adapt confidently—without compromising protection.
Agnė Srėbaliūtė
Senior Creative Copywriter
Agne is a writer with over 15 years of experience in PR, SEO, and creative writing. With a love for playing with words and meanings, she crafts content that’s clear and distinctive. Agne balances her passion for language and tech with hiking adventures in nature—a space that recharges her.
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