SASE is gaining popularity as it solves significant IT challenges — it’s cost-effective and provides security without compromising speed.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a security framework that prescribes converting security and network connectivity technologies into one cloud-delivered platform to enable secure and fast cloud transformation. Its convergence of networking and network security meets the challenges of digital business transformation, edge computing, and workforce mobility.
Data, users, devices, applications and services are used outside the traditional enterprise perimeter, which means that a company constantly seeks to amplify growth by leveraging the cloud. Even with this shift outside of the perimeter, network architectures are still designed in such a way that everything must pass through a perimeter and then back out again. No matter where the users are, they must still report back to corporate networks, often using inefficient and expensive technology only to return to the outside world more often than not. Availability, performance, and productivity of services suffer as a result. These challenges are addressed through a SASE framework.
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What Will change, SASE?
SASE will change how businesses approach security and risk management – networks are still stuck in this mode. Environmental coverage, including visibility and control, can be easily lost when users, devices and data are created and stored virtually everywhere.
Gartner notes that security and risk management leaders need a converged, cloud-delivered secure access service edge (SASE) to address the shift. Gartner’s SASE model has emerged as a comprehensive framework to enable secure and fast cloud transformation relying on a suite of dynamic edge security and connectivity capabilities that can be leveraged from the cloud when needed.
With SASE, secure-access service edges can be dynamically created regardless of what the location of the entities requesting the capabilities is and where they are requesting access to the networked capabilities. On the security side, the SASE converged offering delivers data protection and threat management in one package. The converged service is based on a low-latency, ubiquitous footprint that is very close to the user no matter where they happen to be.
Although SASE frameworks can’t be implemented overnight, Gartner has predicted that “by 2024, 40 per cent of enterprises will have explicit strategies to adopt SASE, up from less than one per cent at year-end 2018.” As a result of the pandemic, many businesses have been forced to adapt to remote work, increasing demand for SASE software.
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How does it work?
SASE combines network traffic and security priorities, ubiquitous threat protection and hyperfast, direct network-to-cloud connectivity. Earlier, enterprises had to choose between speed or control when it came to SASE, but improved technology now offers both to the businesses.
Take for example A sales team needs greater efficiency and efficacy through mobility. The use of the Internet through public Wi-Fi can become a security risk. Therefore, accessing corporate business applications and data in a timely, secure manner is a challenge. A SASE framework provides the construct to maintain higher access speed and performance, while also enabling more stringent control of users, data, and devices traversing networks – regardless of when, where, and how they’re doing it.
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Benefits of SASE
- Reduced costs and complexity – Network Security as a Service should come from a single provider. The consolidation of vendors and technology stacks reduce complexity and cost.
- Adaptability – Enabling new digital business scenarios (apps, services, APIs), and making data more accessible to partners and contractors with less risk exposure.
- Better performance and latency – latency-optimised routing.
- Transparency – Fewer agents per device; less agent and app bloat; consistent experience across devices. Less operational overhead by updating for new threats and policies without using new hardware or software; faster adoption of new capabilities.
- Enables ZTNA – Encryption end-to-end based on users, devices, applications and their identities, rather than IP addresses or physical locations; seamless access to the network. Extended to an endpoint with public Wi-Fi protection by tunnelling to the nearest Point of Presence (POP).
- More effective network – Moving towards strategic projects such as mapping business and regulatory requirements to SASE capabilities.
- A centralised policy with local enforcement – Cloud-based centralised management with distributed enforcement and decision making.
With SASE, businesses can achieve a direct-to-cloud architecture that doesn’t compromise security visibility, control, performance, complexity, or cost. It provides security without compromising speed.
