The working day no longer has a reliable address.
A sales director answers emails from an airport lounge before an early flight. A consultant makes final changes to a presentation from a hotel room. Someone travelling between meetings approves an invoice over coffee, while a remote employee spends the afternoon working from a shared workspace.
None of these situations feels particularly unusual anymore. Yet each one challenges a security model originally designed around employees, devices and applications sitting within the same corporate environment.
If work can happen almost anywhere, businesses need to ask a different question: does their security travel with it?
The Network Has Become the Variable
Inside an office, organizations can exercise considerable control over the network employees use. Outside it, that certainty quickly disappears.
A hotel guest network, airport WiFi connection and local coffee shop hotspot may all provide internet access, but the business has little control over how those networks are configured or maintained.
The solution is not to expect employees to assess the technical security of every network before opening their laptops. Most people cannot realistically determine whether an unfamiliar connection is trustworthy.
Instead, security architecture needs to assume that the underlying network may be untrusted.
This is one reason approaches such as SASE cybersecurity have become relevant to distributed organizations. SASE brings networking and security functions together through cloud-delivered infrastructure, helping businesses apply controls to users beyond the traditional office network.
The location can change without requiring the organization’s fundamental security expectations to change with it.
A Login Should Be the Beginning of the Decision
There was a time when successfully connecting to the company network could effectively establish trust. Modern working patterns make that assumption increasingly difficult to maintain.
Valid credentials answer one question: can this person demonstrate that they are the account holder?
They do not necessarily answer several others. Is the device appropriate? Is the requested resource necessary for that employee’s role? Does the behavior match what would normally be expected? Should this particular connection be treated differently because of its circumstances?
Imagine an employee travelling for work. Accessing email from a managed laptop at an airport might be entirely expected. The same account suddenly attempting to reach sensitive infrastructure it has never previously used presents a different situation.
Modern access models can therefore make decisions using identity and context rather than treating every authenticated session equally.
This also changes how businesses think about remote connectivity. The goal is no longer simply to provide a tunnel back into the corporate network. It is to give people appropriate access to the specific resources required for their work without unnecessarily exposing everything else.
The Application Has Moved Too
It is easy to frame remote working as an employee-location problem, but there has been another significant shift: the applications themselves have moved.
A typical working day might involve Microsoft 365, a cloud CRM, a project management platform, video conferencing, cloud storage and several specialist SaaS applications. Employees may spend much of their day accessing resources that were never located inside the corporate office in the first place.
Routing every interaction through infrastructure designed around a central headquarters can therefore become inefficient.
Security needs to reflect the journey users are actually taking: from distributed devices, across different networks, towards applications hosted in numerous environments.
That means policies need to work consistently across those journeys rather than depending on traffic passing through one physical location.
The Human Factor Still Matters
Technology can reduce risk, but employees still make dozens of small security decisions throughout a travelling workday.
A crowded airport gate may not be the best place to open highly sensitive information. An unattended laptop in a hotel lobby creates a different problem from network security. A convincing phishing email can be dangerous whether someone receives it at headquarters or 3,000 miles away.
Remote-working policies should therefore reflect real situations rather than simply telling employees to “use secure WiFi”.
Useful guidance might address how to handle devices in public spaces, when sensitive work should be postponed, how to report a lost device and what employees should do when an authentication request appears unexpectedly.
The aim is not to make people afraid of working outside the office. It is to make secure behavior practical enough to survive contact with an actual working day.
Meg is an author at Cinnamon Hollow. She writes on a variety of topics sharing tips and ideas for daily life.
