Balancing Security With Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for Better Business Operations and Outcomes

Digital Employee Experience (DEX) and security are often viewed as polar opposites in IT management terms. You could be cynical and say that DEX helps employees (or end-users) to do what they need to do while security puts up barriers to prevent them!

Whilst it may not be that clear cut, the argument becomes irrelevant when an organisation appreciates that balancing both IT management disciplines will help drive employee productivity and ensure corporate compliance to deliver better business outcomes.

In fact, a recent Gartner Magic Quadrant report for DEX Management Tools, stated a common use case for Dex was:

“Reducing security risk and improving patching compliance by identifying and remediating the cause of missing patches, which endpoint management or patching tools often cannot identify or self-heal.”

This is an example of a clear case for DEX and security operations to work together. By ensuring closer alignment between the two teams, you can help minimise any tension between these different IT management disciplines and create better business operations and outcomes.

Addressing the misalignment between IT security and digital experience

What can be done about this tension between IT security and DEX? IT leaders naturally need to ensure that their organisation is suitably secure, but they also don’t want to compromise employee productivity.

IT security is essential. The threats of data breaches, ransomware, and compliance failures are higher than ever. Without a suitable security posture, security failures can literally cripple an organisation, and it is likely that the true impact is understated by those organisations that are affected.

However, overly restrictive security practices and controls can easily frustrate end-users. It can slow down work (causing operational inefficiencies) and encourage your employees to use risky workarounds, including adopting “Shadow IT.”  It can also impact on employee recruitment and retention, particularly amongst younger candidates.

What happens when IT security and DEX practices clash? The most likely result is that end-users (and business outcomes) ultimately suffer in what should be a far more business-centric approach to delivering the best possible portfolio of secure IT services to end-users. The solution is not easy: find the right balance between IT security and DEX that provides the required security posture and business outcomes.

The cost of poor security-DEX integration

Balancing IT security and DEX isn’t just a nice to have. Tension between these IT management disciplines is possibly harming your organisation and its employees, with an impact that could be felt in any number of cases such as:

• Loss of productivity due to clunky login processes or forced patching at inconvenient times
• The need to periodically re-authenticate that disrupts how work gets done
• Security-policy-blocked apps or sites that limit end-user productivity. There is growing concern around “Shadow AI” which might see end-users blocked from accessing ChatGPT rather than an organisation trusting employees to use public AI resources in line with well thought out corporate guidelines
• Poor device performance caused by “heavy” security agents
• Increased employee turnover especially amongst the younger workers that dislike lack of access to consumer-grade tools in the workplace

These and other IT-security-related issues not only adversely affect end-user productivity but also increase security vulnerabilities (as employees seek “helpful” workarounds) and potentially cause higher IT workloads and costs.

Past experience tells us that end-users won’t think twice about prioritising their productivity over a corporate security policy! Plus, don’t ignore the impact of this extra work on your IT security team as they try to protect your organisation despite what end-users are doing.

How digital employee experience (DEX) improves IT security and productivity

DEX platforms can provide real-time visibility into how security policies and tools impact end-user productivity. By analysing the collected experience data and insights, your organisation can use its DEX capabilities to:

• Identify the high-friction security-caused touchpoints, such as VPNs slowing corporate applications or login complexity and failures
• Measure end-user sentiment related to the operational impact of security policies and practices on productivity
• Understand the adoption success rate of secure IT services such as collaboration tools.

However, these opportunities are only part of what’s possible, with DEX platforms able to understand more than security’s impact on end-user experience. For example, your organisation could also:

• Adopt experience-level agreements (XLA) that balance security with usability to help bring about better business outcomes
• Implement automation for proactive security issue resolution, with DEX insight used to prioritise where automation would make the most significant difference to the manual status quo
• Use risk-based intelligence to prioritise and address critical security threats without disrupting employee productivity.

However, not all DEX platforms were born equal, with the following additional capability available in some but not all solutions.

Understanding DEX scoring and experience data

Some DEX platforms, such as Ivanti Neurons for Digital Experience, have introduced DEX Score capabilities. The DEX Score is based on various indicators across IT service management (ITSM), application performance, device health, and security, including hard disk storage, antivirus protection, system events, and incident reports.

Machine learning is employed to facilitate DEX score use, including:

• Combining multiple statistical and machine learning techniques to calculate the DEX score
• Automatically determining normal device behaviour to eliminate the need for manual threshold adjustments
• Evaluating end-user-reported issues using sentiment analysis – classifying feedback text into positive, negative, or neutral categories

Detecting abnormal patterns and identifying the root cause of performance issues using data-mining algorithms.

Starting slowly is better than not starting at all

Organisations might want to delay a DEX investment, whether related to IT security improvements or not, due to budget concerns or security fears. However, many organisations find that the cost of inaction can be far greater.

This might be related to impact on employee performance,  increased IT security risks, the additional IT work and costs caused by the lack of insight and excessive manual tasks, for example.

So don’t delay. But also, don’t feel that your DEX capabilities need to be deployed as a “big bang” project. Instead, they can be implemented gradually using a phased approach:

• Assessing employee sentiment – using real-time experience data to understand end-user frustration points
• Prioritising automation opportunities – starting with high-impact areas such as security patching and ITSM automation
• Consolidating technology stacks – reducing unnecessary IT management tools to simplify ITSM and security workflows
• Monitoring performance and adjusting – tracking experience improvements using AI-powered analytics.

Ultimately, though, your organisation should take the path that delivers the greatest value to its end-users and business results.