Two thirds of Europe’s enterprises now have the majority of their business applications running in the cloud, but secure connectivity to those applications may not be certain for some.

A survey commissioned research among 606 executives across the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands by cloud connectivity company Zscaler found that nearly half (48 per cent) of European enterprises expect the number of people working remotely to grow between 25 and 50 per cent in the next year, but only a third were confident they had a secure remote access infrastructure in place.

In addition, 42 per cent of respondents reported security-related challenges to their networks.

Just over a third (34 per cent) of organisations were evaluating new security solutions in response to growing remote workforce requirements. When asked about their knowledge and plans around secure access service edge (SASE) - the security framework combining WAN capabilities with a range of network security functions - 55 per cent said they planned to adopt this approach.

The most commonly cited reason for moving to SASE was reduced risk of security threats and data loss across distributed data environments (50 per cent), followed by improved network visibility and control across all users and cloud platforms (39 per cent) and reduced complexity/increased agility of infrastructure (36 per cent).

Ismail Elmas, vice president of EMEA and APAC at Zscaler, said: “Businesses are waking up to the benefits of the cloud, both for business agility and workforce flexibility, however, the challenges they point to imply that they are not transforming fast enough.

“The struggle with multi-cloud set-ups, complexity and security are the same as they’ve always been but require a new vision with regards to modern network infrastructures," he continued, adding: "The fact so many enterprises are still combining their cloud infrastructure with traditional remote desktop and VPN solutions will not effectively address these challenges.”

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