Professional services firms are grappling with significant new networking and security challenges as they transition towards digital-first operations.

This is according to a report from Aryaka which surveyed senior IT and infrastructure leaders working in the industry.

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 us SaaS adoption to support remote and hybrid work. These decentralised, 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.

Services organisations are looking to modernise 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 optimising 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 securing SaaS and public cloud apps (66%) as their top struggle, followed by managing remote user access (58%), and operating with limited IT staff (54%).

Recommended reading

• SaaS Security Breaches Surge 300%
• Despite the Risks, 73% of Security Pros Use Unauthorised SaaS
• Too-Great Expectations: What’s Behind Chronic Software Delays?

Survey respondents also noted managing too many vendor/support contracts (46%) and gas in performance and threat visibility (43%).

Organisations are also concerningly failing to prioritise edge security, the survey found. 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 – like ZeroTrust, secure web gateways, and firewall technologies – are often fragmented or under-deployed.

Services organisations 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 decentralised 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.