DEX and security don’t have to be at odds

For decades, IT leaders have accepted a painful compromise: you can have tight security or a great user experience, but rarely both. Each improvement in protection seemed to come with a cost in performance, usability, or trust.

It’s easy to see how this mindset took hold. Consider the large government agency that I worked with as a client at Forrester. Over the years, its devices had accumulated layer upon layer of endpoint protection tools, ranging from antivirus and anti-malware to endpoint detection and response and additional security measures.

Each tool did its job, but collectively they slowed down device performance to the point that boot times averaged 25 minutes. Employees developed the habit of coming into work, turning on their devices, and going for coffee while they booted. Not exactly the most productive experience, right?

This kind of bloat, driven by good intentions, reflects the long-standing assumption that experience and security exist in tension. To harden the environment meant to burden the user.

In today’s digital workplace, that mindset is undergoing a rethink. Today, organizations are increasingly treating security and experience as two sides of the same coin. As I wrote in 2020, establishing a zero-trust strategy is critical to improving the digital employee experience, and vice versa. Why? When implemented correctly, secure-by-design architectures and intelligent automation can enhance the user experience rather than hinder it.

Let’s talk about how.

When security improves the user experience

Security used to mean friction: long passwords, cumbersome virtual private networks (VPNs), constant reauthentication, and intrusive updates. But over the last five years, investments in security have also driven breakthroughs in user experience, not by loosening controls, but by rethinking how they’re delivered.

A few examples:

• Passwordless authentication methods, such as passkeys and biometrics, have replaced complex password policies with frictionless, high-trust sign-ins. Users gain time; security gains certainty.
• Secure service edge (SSE) architectures have modernized secure networking, enabling organizations to enhance their security posture. Instead of clunky VPN tunnels tied to domain connections, cloud-based access brokers provide policy-based security without slowing down workflows.
• Adaptive trust models have made access dynamic, verifying context continuously rather than front-loading authentication at the expense of usability. For example, providing easier access to applications in a known location (i.e., your home office during working hours) while prompting for additional credentials in unknown locations (such as a remote office 1,000 miles away at 3:00 AM).

Even remote access, historically one of the biggest sources of security friction, has evolved. Legacy virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) was often slow, bandwidth-heavy, and complex to manage, not to mention costly. TeamViewer continues to deliver secure, encrypted access directly to endpoints, eliminating the overhead of streaming compute and ensuring both high performance and complete control.

Human-centric security design is flipping the traditional paradigm of the tension between security and experience. When done well, security and experience should be mutually reinforcing, provided they’re designed through the lens of digital experience.

 

The DEX advantage: Real-time data and remediation drives trust assurance

The convergence of security and digital experience is increasingly visible in the rise of DEX platforms. DEX has traditionally focused on improving IT experience, measuring digital health, reducing incident volumes, and automating remediation. But its underlying capabilities also map directly to key security and compliance outcomes.

At its core, DEX is about visibility, remediation, and automation. Three things that every security team needs.

Let’s look at how DEX directly supports zero trust and broader security objectives:

1. Desired state management

DEX continuously enforces known-good configurations across devices. By defining a “desired state”. This includes registry settings, policies, and approved applications. It also covers automatically restoring that state when drift occurs. This way, DEX can close the loop between configuration and compliance. This is foundational to zero trust, where every device must be verified, validated, and governed dynamically.

2. Agent integrity and compliance assurance

Security tools only protect as well as they perform. DEX platforms can detect when critical agents or services, such as CrowdStrike, Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, or BitLocker, stop functioning properly. By identifying and automatically repairing corrupted or inactive agents, DEX prevents silent failures that could expose devices to risk or noncompliance.

3. Anomaly and threat signal detection

A sudden CPU spike or unexplained latency may not just be a performance issue; it could indicate malware, ransomware activity, or an unauthorized process. DEX’s telemetry provides an early-warning layer that complements traditional security monitoring by surfacing anomalies from a user-centric lens.

4. Offline security enforcement

Because DEX platforms with distributed architectures, such as TeamViewer DEX, operate directly at the endpoint edge, they can enforce policies and automations even when a device is disconnected from the network. That’s critical in air-gapped environments or incident-response scenarios where isolation is required.

5. Instant vulnerability and patch intelligence

DEX provides real-time insight into installed software, versions, and patch levels. Not just from a compliance checklist, but from an experience perspective. When vulnerabilities are detected, DEX can automatically trigger remediation workflows, minimizing exposure windows and ensuring devices stay secure without manual intervention.

6. Rationalizing security agent sprawl

Ultimately, DEX highlights the impact of security tooling on performance. By quantifying how each agent affects system responsiveness, boot times, or battery life, IT teams can identify redundant solutions and rationalize overlapping capabilities. Thereby, they achieve both tighter security and a better user experience.

Together, these capabilities shift DEX from being a “productivity monitor” to being a trust enabler, an operational fabric that connects IT experience with endpoint assurance.

SMB vs. enterprise: Two paths to secure experience  

The journey toward integrated security and experience looks different depending on the size and maturity of the organization. Especially for small and midsized organizations (SMBs), it’s time to take DEX seriously.

For SMBs: Simplicity and unified control

Smaller organizations don’t have the luxury of massive security operations centers or complex endpoint management stacks. They need outcomes that are fast, unified, and easy to deploy.

That’s where the TeamViewer ONE platform shines. It combines visibility, automation, remote access, and now DEX capabilities into a single edge-native solution. SMBs can monitor device health, enforce compliance baselines, patch vulnerabilities, and maintain secure access, all from one platform.

By consolidating tools, SMBs not only reduce cost and complexity but also remove friction points that compromise user experience. In this way, ONE delivers enterprise-grade protection without enterprise overhead, democratizing both DEX and security.

For Enterprises: Integration and intelligence

Larger organizations already invest in a broad ecosystem of tools, including IT service management (ITSM), endpoint detection and response (EDR), and security information and event management (SIEM) platforms, as well as identity and endpoint management systems. Their challenge isn’t capability, but coordination.

This is where the power of real-time data and remediation provides unique value. TeamViewer's integration capabilities enable enterprises to integrate DEX intelligence into their existing zero-trust frameworks seamlessly. Be it ITSM workflows, endpoint automation, or real-time compliance,

By correlating experience data with identity, configuration, and security posture information, enterprises can move toward a unified view of trust assurance: not just “is this device secure?” but “is this device secure and usable?”

The result is a virtuous cycle where DEX insights enhance security visibility, and security data enhances experience optimization.

The future: Experience as a measure of trust 

The next frontier for DEX and security/compliance isn’t just co-existence, it’s convergence.

Regulations such as the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), the Network and Information Systems Directive 2 (NIS2), and ISO 27001 are constantly evolving. Organizations will need to demonstrate not only that their systems are secure but also that their operational environments are resilient, consistent, and well-governed.

In 2026, emerging experience standards, such as NEN 8038, from the Royal Netherlands Standardization Institute will place greater pressure on chief information officers (CIOs) to deliver positive digital experiences for employees.

DEX platforms will play an instrumental role in meeting these requirements. DEX metrics such as configuration stability, patch compliance, or agent health will become part of an organization’s digital trust evidence. Security audits won’t just check for controls; they’ll verify experience health as an indicator of control integrity.

Meanwhile, AI will accelerate this shift in three key ways:

1. AI-driven correlation: DEX systems will automatically identify links between poor user experiences and increased security risks. For example, when high CPU utilization from a misconfigured security agent correlates with delayed patching or skipped updates.
2. AI as an advisor: Rather than just highlighting issues, AI will recommend and even execute optimized actions to maintain compliance without degrading experience. Think of it as a digital compliance coach embedded in your DEX layer.
3. AI for external benchmarking: By continuously comparing your organization’s device health, patching speed, and vulnerability exposure to industry peers, AI will enable proactive trust management.

In this model, DEX becomes a critical vantage point for ensuring trust, not just for internal IT use cases, but also for customers.

The strategic payoff: Turning a tradeoff into a multiplier