A positive user experience with security tools is essential to security itself. If a given application or policy is too hard or time-consuming to use, users will simply work outside of company security protocols — they may use their own email accounts and services or choose their own applications and cloud providers, ultimately circumventing entire layers of security technology.
Having solid security measures in place is a necessary condition for achieving your organization’s overarching goals, but user productivity requires both security and usability. When security harms usability, the organization’s overall efforts may be hampered as well. In this way, inconvenience can reduce not only productivity and usability, but also security. It is therefore critical for your organization to balance security policy with usability.
How Security Specialists Can Safeguard Usability
The greatest contributor to eroding usability in enterprise systems is when the security team operates in a constant state of reaction — rush this patch, lock down that app, remove those privileges.
Security threats, vulnerabilities and breaches come at you fast, and it’s hard enough just to keep up. The proactive way to incorporate usability is to replace piecemeal security thinking with an all-encompassing strategy based on coherence and harmony with tools, policies and training.
Balancing security and usability, in other words, is not something that’s achievable on the fly. It is enabled by comprehensive design. Here are the building blocks of a secure enterprise that maximizes usability.
Embrace Unified Policy Management
Employees are heavily burdened by overcomplexity, which makes their ..
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