The Key To Progress: Unlocking Business Growth With Security

Navigating the ever-evolving security landscape can be a daunting task for organizations striving for growth and productivity. It’s easy to focus on building an infrastructure that can adapt to rapidly changing business priorities and overlook security along the way. However, striking the right balance between innovation and security can position your business to better meet changing needs and scale for growth.

What Gets in the Way of Securing Your Environment

In the face of a rapidly changing industry, many barriers can get in the way of prioritizing security. Assessing your primary challenge can help you strategically focus your resources on the right solutions:

Digital expansion

• Innovation is occurring faster than ever. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) have made the possibilities of data-driven decision-making a reality, allowing for more automated processes and business efficiency. However, AI introduces risks to employees and company information that must be managed. Additionally, while cloud computing has helped with remote work massification, traditional network structures are now more decentralized with more devices and larger perimeters to secure.

Expanding threat ecosystem

• Unfortunately, as businesses rapidly innovate, bad actors develop new tactics to manipulate people and gain access to confidential information. Not only are ransomware attacks persisting, but bad actors are targeting devices outside the perimeter and infecting them with malware. We continue to see more sophisticated and multi-vector attacks which require complex countermeasures to identify, respond to and prevent.

Limited resources

• This expanding landscape requires security teams to quickly adapt, constantly facing new threats while managing and preventing against those all too familiar. With many tools deployed to address different concerns, security teams are stretched thin trying to manage them successfully. Further, budget constraints can get in the way of retaining top security talent and finding the tools that best secure your environment.

How Security Can Support Business Growth

Increased visibility

• Security is essential for businesses to maintain visibility in a distributed ecosystem. With more systems and tools to manage, a comprehensive strategy that addresses all potential points of vulnerability is crucial. Not only can you protect against outside threats by adopting a more proactive approach to security, but you can also secure your internal processes, giving you more control and protection over critical data. Embedding security into your everyday practices frees your focus to innovate without disruption.

Improved employee productivity

• A well-integrated security strategy can help employees work more effectively without worrying about potential security events. This means that all the different systems, devices and applications enabling day-to-day work must partner seamlessly and be simple to deploy and manage. With the right technology infrastructure, employees can maximize efficiency through more collaboration and therefore quicker decision-making.

Cost optimization

• Integrating security in every piece of your operations can help you get the most out of your technology investments. With the right solutions, you can prevent bad actors from infiltrating your environment by protecting your critical data from potential attacks and avoiding costly incident mitigation. Beyond that, evaluating your environment for weaknesses is an opportunity to optimize your security tools, ensuring that you’re maximizing their potential to protect your business.

So, Where Do You Start?

In the early stages of digital transformation, it can be challenging to balance focus between innovation and security. When these priorities are aligned, systems work together and employees are empowered to focus on the company’s strategic initiatives. Consider the following as you approach changes to your security strategies:

1. Assess the current environment for vulnerabilities present in daily operations and understand where more might emerge. Find the weak points in your infrastructure.
2. Evaluate tools for their interoperability. Are they creating data silos or making work more collaborative?
3. Develop response plans to prepare systems and employees for an efficient response in the instance of a breach.
4. Implement security frameworks that optimize the performance of your technology infrastructure. Ensure they are adaptable to future growth, but robust and simple to manage.

How Can Lumen Help?

Lumen’s expert advisors are here to help you align your security strategies to your growth objectives. By evaluating tools based on their performance and cost to your organization, we help to enable your employees to work more efficiently and collaboratively. Our unique visibility into new and emerging cyberthreats positions us to help you proactively secure your network and operations. Lumen’s guidance and expertise can help you develop a comprehensive security strategy that fosters growth and seamlessly integrates within your environment.

You don’t have to choose between security and business growth—unleash your organization’s digital potential.

This content is provided for informational purposes only and may require additional research and substantiation by the end user. In addition, the information is provided “as is” without any warranty or condition of any kind, either express or implied. Use of this information is at the end user’s own risk. Lumen does not warrant that the information will meet the end user’s requirements or that the implementation or usage of this information will result in the desired outcome of the end user. This document represents Lumen’s products and offerings as of the date of issue. Services not available everywhere. Business customers only. Lumen may change or cancel products and services or substitute similar products and services at its sole discretion without notice. ©2024 Lumen Technologies. All Rights Reserved.