New Survey Report Shows that Business and Professional Services Organizations Grapple with Networking and Security Challenges as they Pivot to Cloud and SaaS

Survey finds that 72% of respondents are prioritizing improved application and SaaS performance while 66% struggle to secure SaaS and public cloud apps

SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 13, 2025–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Aryaka®, the leader in and first to deliver Unified SASE as a Service, today announced the results of a new survey report exploring networking and security trends in the business and professional services sector. The data shows that services firms are grappling with significant new networking and security challenges as they increasingly transition towards digital-first operations. The report (“The State of Network Security in Business and Professional Services”), commissioned by Aryaka, 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 up SaaS adoption to support remote and hybrid work. These decentralized, 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.

SaaS Performance and Security Demands Vex Strained IT Teams

Services organizations are looking to modernize 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 optimizing 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 the following:

• Securing SaaS and public cloud apps (66%)

• Managing remote user access and latency (58%)

• Operating with limited internal IT staff (54%)

• Managing too many vendors/support contracts (46%)

• Gaps in performance and threat visibility (43%)

To make matters worse, organizations in the sector are failing to prioritize edge security. 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 (such as Zero Trust Network Access, Secure Web Gateway, and Next-Generation Firewall technologies) are often fragmented or under-deployed.