This article was originally written by Avanade alum Chris Miller.

Here’s a bold idea – one that provides a much-needed change of perspective for the entire enterprise, from HR, to operations, to sales:

Security isn’t just a proactive defense layer. It is one of the key factors of successful digital transformation.

Whether you are looking to improve productivity, modernize operations or deliver a more compelling customer experience, security drives measurable, significant business outcomes.

1. Security empowers your employees
Today’s employees are working faster, collaborating in new ways and demanding seamless, engaging experiences. Modern security solutions play a central role in delivering these new levels of productivity.

• Increasing adoption: Best-in-class security makes it easier for employees to get the right access, at the right time. Single-sign on reduces the need to memorize dozens of passwords. Modern multi-factor authentication (MFA) lets employees use easy-to-access things – such as their fingerprint, or even their face – to speed up the process. By reducing the friction, modern security makes employees more likely to adopt new tools, which in turn enable productivity gains.
• Minimizing interruptions: Software upgrades, data breaches and other security events have a real cost to productivity. Modern security tools enable advanced threat protection and keep things running smoothly, behind the scenes. The result is your employees spend more time connected to the applications they need to get work done.
• Preventing human error: One of the most devasting things an employee can do is inadvertently cause a data breach. All the training in the world will never fully eliminate this threat. But modern security tools reduce the burden on end-users, leveraging automation and artificial intelligence to filter out threats, such as phishing scams, before the user ever seems them.

Far more than just offering a protective shield, security best practices help us reimagine the workplace experience. Modern security solutions enable flexibility and create a more engaging employee experience, from the start. As you will see below, there is a similar case to be made for security’s value to back-office operations.

2. Security optimizes operations and efficiency
Unleashing efficiency is one of the chief goals of modernizing the enterprise, with a migration to cloud platforms such as Microsoft Office 365 and Azure. A modern security approach helps deliver on those promises, giving administrators more control, visibility and simplicity.

• Seamless upgrades: Evergreen subscription platforms do away with the perennial need to monitor and upgrade applications. They also pro-actively monitor and fix for bugs and vulnerabilities. As a result, IT has to spend less time on manual upgrades and maintenance – and can focus instead on innovation.
• Reducing support costs: Modern security also relies heavily on self-service and minimizing the hurdles to adoption for end-users. This reduces the amount of support tickets and enables end-users to reset passwords and adopt new tools, without asking for help.
• Intelligence, unleashed: Modern cloud platforms also provide a compelling advantage with automation, artificial intelligence and analytics. Microsoft, for example, invests over a billion dollars a year into its security resources and operations. It also leverages a crowd-sourced network of billions of endpoints, emails and documents to intelligently monitor and stop threats as they emerge.

Modern security can boost your productivity with end-users, as well as your operations. But what about outside the enterprise: Does security add value to the customer experience?

3. Security engages your customers and builds trust
The answer is yes. Personalized services and new digital business models rely on your ability to collect and protect the private data of your customers. The best security solutions today help make this happen – and make sure your customer experience is more compelling, and trust-worthy.

• Keeping the trust: A major breach that makes it into the headlines can be devastating to customer trust. Advanced threat protection and data loss prevention are the cornerstones of building a resilient business. They will reduce your exposure and protect your brand if (and more likely when) an attack occurs.
• Reliability: Breaches and attacks such as DDoS also have an immediate impact on your ability to serve your customers. Downtimes can last days, or longer, without the proper disaster recovery mechanisms or incident response training. In today’s digital economy, where competitive alternatives are everywhere, even a minor interruption to your services can have lasting impact on the bottom line.
• Compliance: With the rise of regulations and compliance laws, such as GDPR, business across all industries need to work hard to meet standards. Modern security solutions make it easier to identify compliance needs, and automatically fulfill them, while your data grows and expands across international boundaries at the same time.

The bottom line: Modern security makes business sense
It’s tempting to think of security as a pure prevention play. And as the threat landscape continues to get more devious and sophisticated, you can see why all business must have a solid defense.

But, it’s a serious mistake to leave the conversation on that point.

Security isn’t just prevention – it’s a strategy to drive business outcomes. It makes your employees more engaged. It gives operations more efficiency. And it helps maintain trust, and a sense of reliability, with your customers.

Learn more about the business outcomes you can achieve when you #SecureTheEnterprise.