Modern businesses require greater agility and scalability, reduced complexity, and improved security. SASE delivers on these demands by consolidating networking and security into a single service.
A unified SASE solution combines software-defined vast area network (SD-WAN), zero-trust network access, and cloud web security. This approach reduces complexity, improves performance, and cuts operational costs for IT teams.
What is SASE?
Whether your organization is trying to break down technology siloes, support digital transformation, or enable remote work, consider SASE part of your security and networking infrastructure. As with any change, migrating to a SASE architecture requires buy-in from all stakeholders and a thorough evaluation of your priorities and needs.
A SASE solution combines networking and security into a single platform that can be deployed in the cloud to protect users, applications, and data wherever they are located. This eliminates the need for on-premises hardware appliances at the network’s edge and provides consistent enforcement of security policies across the enterprise.
The SASE framework can also mitigate DDoS attacks by intercepting traffic before it reaches the corporate network and protecting the system from large-scale attacks. This capability is based on the SASE providers that can deliver low latency to users regardless of location.
When selecting a SASE solution, choose one that offers a full range of networking and security capabilities, including SD-WAN, ZTNA, and FWaaS. Ensure the SASE framework adheres to Zero Trust principles and enables identity-based access control. Look for a solution that delivers unified management consoles and a single policy engine to streamline operations and improve efficiency and effectiveness for your network and security teams.
How Does SASE Work?
So, what does SASE stand for? Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is an approach to cloud architecture that delivers network and security-as-a-service operations as a single cloud service. SASE enhances networking and security capabilities beyond what is generally possible from a conceptual standpoint. With SASE, you can deploy and manage all your network and security capabilities in a single cloud service. This model eliminates siloed tools and data, which can create blind spots. It also allows IT teams to rely on a single portal for remote and cloud access. This way, you can ensure that the same security policies are applied to all applications and services. Combined with the security features of SD-WAN, SASE provides an integrated approach to networking and security, improving security threat management and reducing complexity.
Instead of requiring VPN tunnels or proxies to connect remote users to company assets, SASE uses security protocols to verify user identity and request context at the points of presence (PoPs) closest to the edge. This reduces latency and improves performance. It also makes it easier to extend zero trust network access (ZTNA) to remote users, mobile devices, and SaaS applications.
SASE offers a more flexible architecture than traditional network equipment and systems, allowing you to scale quickly as your business grows. You can also minimize costs by removing the need for physical data centers and servers. By combining network and security functions in a single service, SASE can boost the performance of inexpensive broadband connections and reduce operational expenses associated with hardware purchases and maintenance.
What are the Benefits of SASE?
SASE promises to combine networking and security into a single architecture that delivers more flexibility, better performance, and lower costs than different technologies. But for enterprises, there are challenges to implementing a fully integrated SASE solution that can scale across the enterprise.
A SASE solution with a zero trust network access (ZTNA) model can give enterprises granular visibility and control over users, systems, and applications accessing corporate resources. This type of security architecture offers a more secure alternative to traditional, trust-based models that can leave networks vulnerable to attacks and slow down performance.
SASE can also improve bandwidth and connectivity issues by leveraging network application optimization, caching, and compression algorithms and providing real-time contextual awareness to make decisions about resource access. This is accomplished by analyzing the identity of each request, the location of the source device or branch office, and other factors, such as data sensitivity, to determine which services are accessed, allowed, or rejected.
Another benefit of SASE is that it can deliver a full suite of enterprise-grade tools, including firewall as a service (FWaaS), for greater scalability and consistency. This allows IT teams to build a unified security architecture that does not compromise networking functions or security services, including the ability to manage the security of cloud applications through a central management console without integrating with an external CASB.
What are the Challenges of SASE?
As with most new networking and security technologies, deploying SASE is a complex undertaking requiring significant effort. It’s essential that enterprises thoroughly research SASE vendors to ensure they can consolidate multiple networking and security capabilities and functions — like SD-WAN, secure web gateway (SWG), unified threat management (UTM), software-defined perimeter (SDP), zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and firewall-as-a-service — into one cloud-native platform.
Enterprises must also consider their IT environments’ unique structure and use cases to ensure that SASE is configured appropriately. The last thing enterprises want is to end up with a daisy chain of point solutions that don’t play well together — which can lead to complicated, error-prone configurations and finger-pointing among vendors.
Finally, enterprises must ensure they have the proper personnel and resources to implement and manage a full SASE implementation. This includes ensuring that networking and security operations teams are on the same page and working collaboratively to effectively and efficiently deploy and maintain SASE.
In addition, enterprises should make sure that they choose a SASE solution that offers a global network footprint to detect threats at the edge of their networks, as opposed to passing traffic through multiple points of presence and adding latency to their operations. This can mitigate the impact of DDoS attacks and other network attacks that originate at remote locations and threaten the security of critical data and applications.