Securing Work That Doesn’t Move in Straight Lines

A dynamic business meeting featuring a diverse team analyzing data and collaborating on strategies using modern technology in a contemporary office setting. Amity

Modern work is more connected than ever. Intelligent devices, collaboration platforms, and cloud services have rapidly proliferated, transforming how people interact and how information moves, both professionally and personally. Work no longer follows predictable lines. It is happening faster, across more systems, and in hybrid and remote workplaces that extend far beyond the boundaries of a single office or network.

Yet, inside many organizations, work remains fragmented. Teams rely on multiple disconnected tools, information moves between systems that don’t fully communicate, and departments operate in silos shaped more by structure than by how work gets done. While this fragmentation can hinder communication and collaboration, it also introduces less visible, but more serious, security and compliance risks. 

To understand why organizations struggle to secure work effectively, we need to look beyond individual tools and examine how work truly flows in practice. This means confronting the fragmented reality of today’s workplace, how silos form, the risks they introduce, and how organizations can begin aligning security with real-world workflows.

The fragmented reality of modern work 

As organizations adopt more tools, fragmentation becomes inevitable. Research from Salesforce shows organizations now use more than 1,000 different applications, yet roughly 70% on average are not integrated and, consequently, not communicating with each other.

In most organizations, fragmentation begins the moment information moves beyond its original creator.  Even simple file collaboration becomes complex, as documents, data, or outputs must pass between multiple people, teams, and systems, each governed by different tools, permissions, and processes. As fragmentation increases, maintaining continuity, visibility, and control becomes significantly more difficult. 

These challenges intensify as workflows scale beyond their original scope. As more contributors and departments get involved, workflows naturally accumulate more touchpoints. Consider a common scenario: a sales contract is drafted in a document management system and then downloaded for internal review across multiple departments. From there, it may be emailed externally to a customer, printed for signature, scanned, and uploaded again — with each step introducing new copies, new (or no) access controls, and new opportunities for visibility gaps to emerge.

Without deliberately designed and secure systems to manage these transitions, breakdowns become almost inevitable. What begins as a simple collaboration effort can quickly become a patchwork of copies, workarounds, and disconnected activities.

This challenge has continued to intensify over the past decade. Modern distributed and hybrid work models now operate across multiple offices, homes, and geographies, with information residing on local workstations, in on‑premises data centers, across multiple cloud environments, or all of the above.

Security models that were once designed for physical or centralized environments no longer align with how work is done today, as team members collaborate not just down the hallway, but also across cities, regions, and continents.

A recent study from Gallup found that 52% of employees with remote-capable jobs want a hybrid work arrangement and predicts it will grow to 61% by 2027. This signals that organizations must not only accommodate distributed workforces but actively enable seamless collaboration, regardless of where employees are located or resources reside. With cybersecurity now at the forefront of many organizations’ priorities, it is a foundational business requirement to prioritize secure access to mitigate the possibility of operational disruption, erosion of customer trust, regulatory penalties, and long-term reputational damage. 

When security breaks down – without bad intent 

It may come as a surprise that security incidents are not always the result of malicious behavior. Often, they stem from well-intentioned employees simply trying to meet deadlines or get their work done. 

This behavior is far from isolated. Nearly two-thirds of employees report bypassing security policies — not out of disregard, but in an effort to improve productivity and work more efficiently. When ease of use conflicts with security requirements, employees often perceive controls as obstacles rather than safeguards. In those moments, shortcuts are taken, resulting in weakened security.  

Time pressure further complicates the issue. As urgency increases, so does the likelihood of lapses in judgement, including missteps that security threats are eager to exploit. The result is a persistent vulnerability that exists not in the technology stack, but in the daily friction employees experience when security and workflows are misaligned.  

This is a common and consistently underestimated workplace reality. Despite well-designed security frameworks on paper, they must account for how people actually work in order to be followed consistently and accurately.

Silos and what they really mean from a security perspective 

The phenomenon of silos isn’t limited to departments or organizational charts. A silo can be a team, a physical location, a workflow, or even a loosely connected group of users sharing access to a resource without mutual oversight. 

From a security standpoint, silos form wherever ownership is unclear, systems are disconnected, or workflows operate independently. As data moves across these boundaries, protections that exist in the original environment may no longer apply. 

When users copy or move information outside of managed collaboration systems, security controls can fall away. While working outside the system may feel more convenient, it increases the risk of unauthorized access, data exposure, or breaches. 

The visibility problem and why it persists 

One of the most persistent consequences of siloed work is loss of visibility. Organizations struggle to track where data lives, who has access to it, and how it’s being used, especially when workflows span cloud services, document and information-sharing tools, and print environments.

These blind spots are often symptomatic of weak governance around approved tools and processes. A recent benchmarking survey reinforces the scope of the issue. Nearly 60% of respondents reported that security incidents are linked to visibility gaps rather than missing controls or intent. This highlights a critical truth; when systems operate in silos, organizations are effectively left flying blind across their own data landscape. The problem compounds when different teams rely on different tools to achieve similar outcomes, further fragmenting visibility, and in many cases, deepening the silos security frameworks are designed to eliminate. Employees may be unaware of what resources exist beyond their immediate toolkit, making the issue equally organizational as it is technical. Without shared governance and cross-functional coordination, security teams are positioned to be reactive rather than proactive in managing risk before it materializes. 

Compliance on paper vs. security in practice 

Most organizations have policies, standards, procedures, and guidelines designed to support compliance, but documentation alone does not ensure secure behavior.

Of the 1,802 executives surveyed in PwC’s Global Compliance Survey 2025, 77% reported that compliance complexity has negatively impacted their organization. Left unmanaged, this complexity creates gaps. When systems are difficult to use or fail to enforce policies naturally, employees are left without the tools that make secure behavior the path of least resistance. 

The result is a familiar tension. Organizations may appear compliant on paper during audits yet struggle to maintain consistent security controls in the day-to-day flow of work, particularly across documents, workflows, and information outputs. Compliance and security are not synonymous, and organizations that conflate the two often find themselves exposed where they believed they were protected.  

Why connection matters more than more tools 

Fragmentation doesn’t just complicate work; it actively weakens security. Navigating multiple systems with varying degrees of complexity increases the likelihood that controls will be bypassed. 

Employees tend to choose the easiest path to completion. If one platform feels significantly harder to use than another, work naturally migrates toward convenience. Over time, this erodes the security posture of the entire organization. 

More connected systems, by contrast, reduce friction. When workflows are designed holistically, security becomes more consistent, more visible, and easier to follow without adding new tools or layers of complexity. 

Designing security around how work happens 

When security is designed around workflows rather than individual tools, the impact can be significant. Properly secured, intuitive workflows can improve productivity, reduce errors, and increase user satisfaction. 

Achieving this requires close coordination between workflow design and information security teams. Security must be collaborative rather than adversarial. When security teams are perceived as barriers, or as the proverbial “Department of No,” employees are more likely to seek paths around controls. 

Involving users directly in the design of digital workflows and listening to their input around how they work is critical to success. When organizations work with their employees to shape secure processes, they will be better positioned to balance protection and usability. 

Where organizations can start 

While every organization’s environment is different, here are a few common principles leaders can follow to reduce fragmentation and strengthen security without slowing work. 

1. Map how work actually flows; don’t assume how it works: Security gaps most often emerge at handoffs, when information moves between departments, systems, and formats. Understanding real workflows, rather than assumed ones, helps organizations identify where visibility and controls can break. 

2. Treat workflows as security boundaries, not just individual systems: When security is enforced independently within disconnected tools, protections weaken as work moves outside those environments. Applying consistent controls across workflows helps maintain security as information moves. 

3. Involve users early during workflow design: Workarounds are often a sign of friction, not defiance. Engaging the people who use workflows every day helps strike a better balance between security and usability, and reduces the need for shortcuts. 

4. Focus governance on consistency and visibility, not rigidity: Clear guidance on which tools and workflows should be used — and why — helps minimize blind spots. Consistency makes secure behavior easier to follow and easier to enforce. 

5. Position security as an enabler of work, not a barrier to it: When security teams collaborate closely with IT and business stakeholders, controls become a natural part of how work gets done instead of something employees feel compelled to work around. 

A path forward for modern organizations 

Improving security in a fragmented workplace doesn’t require abandoning flexibility or slowing work down; it requires better alignment.

Organizations can start by involving stakeholders early when designing or redesigning workflows, ensuring security supports productivity, rather than competing with it. Clear governance around tools, combined with secure, easy-to-use systems, helps keep information visible and protected as it moves. 

Looking ahead, security is likely to shift beyond centralized oversight alone and become more deeply embedded within workflows themselves. As security becomes a seamless part of everyday processes — not an afterthought — it can move from being seen as a necessary evil to a critical enabler of organizational success. 

In a world where work no longer moves in one direction, organizations that break down unnecessary silos and improve communication between disconnected tools and systems will find security not as an obstacle to workflows, but as a natural extension of how people work.