Choosing the right SASE solution for your organization isn’t a decision to take lightly. The vendor landscape constantly shifts with new technology acquisitions and updates.
SASE architecture combines networking and security for a more simplified approach to network performance. Its unified capabilities include WAN network services, Cloud-access Security Brokers (CASB), Zero Trust networking, and Secure Web Gateways.
Benefits
In addition to speeding up service delivery and improving operational efficiencies, SASE or Secure Access Service Edge offers tangible cost savings. With a single-vendor SASE solution, IT teams can reduce the number of networking and security point products they need to purchase and maintain, freeing up budget for other business needs.
Unlike legacy approaches to inspection and verification that forward traffic from remote users through multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services to firewalls in your data center, SASE enables you to secure user access closer to them by inspecting internet traffic at points of presence in their regions. This reduces network complexity and WAN costs, makes for more efficient bandwidth use, and eliminates the need to “hairpin” traffic to data centers for inspection.
When users sign in, their access is contextualized based on their device, location, and application. This allows you to enforce a least-privileged model and mitigates many common attacks, such as man-in-the-middle interceptions, spoofing, and malware spread.
SASE also improves bandwidth and connectivity issues by applying network application optimization capabilities such as monitoring, caching, compression algorithms, and protocol optimization. The result is that your organization’s remote and mobile users get more responsive, lower-latency performance across the business web.
Costs
SASE is a framework for breaking down siloes of networking and security solutions, enabling new business scenarios that were previously unavailable and reducing the risk from cyberattacks. However, enterprises should weigh the benefits against the costs before implementing SASE for their networks.
Typically, SASE solutions combine networking services (such as SD-WAN) with security capabilities such as cloud access security brokers, Zero Trust network access, and firewalls. These services are delivered as a single service to the enterprise, replacing many traditional networking layers and point solutions.
With a SASE solution, users can connect to corporate resources remotely without the delays and costs of connecting through a VPN. This slashes network latency and boosts productivity for remote and mobile workers.
SASE provides more protection from cyberattacks for networks and end-users as a network solution than traditional perimeter-based solutions. It also reduces the number of security tools and solutions in use, simplifying management and lowering costs.
When selecting a SASE provider, businesses should choose one with experience in networking and security solutions. Picking vendors with separate backgrounds in networking and security could lead to performance problems. Additionally, a vendor focused on networking might need more in-line proxies for SASE or help with a new architecture and platform. These issues can result in high upfront costs and lower ROI expectations than expected.
Implementation
Choosing the right SASE solution starts with assessing your security infrastructure and network design to understand the needed capabilities. Then, it’s essential to identify the business problems you want to solve. need to increase support for remote and hybrid work? Do you need to augment a zero-trust initiative? Do you need to modernize secure application access? Defining the specific business objectives gives you a clear roadmap to implementing SASE.
The next step is to evaluate potential vendors and their SASE solutions. Look for unified services that deliver multiple capabilities, including security functions, policies, and connectivity services. These suitable services cut complexity and cost by eliminating the need for separate point solutions and managing multiple hardware devices. Additionally, they deliver improved performance and scalability, reducing the overall cost of ownership.
Also, choose a vendor offering a single-vendor SASE solution supporting your entire networking architecture and security strategy. This will ensure consistent security and user experience across all locations, regardless of how users connect to your organization’s applications and data. It will also reduce operational overhead and allow for better security integration. Look for solutions that provide centralized behavior analytics, essential to spotting threats and anomalies that individual tools may not detect. This is particularly important for global networks, where you will likely deal with different security and network environments.
Security
SASE networking provides the security measures enterprises need to secure cloud and application access. Unlike traditional network security architecture that forwards remote user traffic to a data center for inspection, SASE technology moves these capabilities closer to the edge, enabling organizations to support more users working from home, on the go, and at other locations with consistent speed and low latency.
A SASE network also provides security-as-a-service capabilities such as a secure web gateway, firewall, and anti-malware to prevent the unauthorized entry of malware into an organization’s network. SASE also uses a zero-trust architecture to ensure that all users and devices are authenticated and authorized before being granted access to the network, protecting against unauthorized access and data breaches.
With these security capabilities pushed to the edge, SASE allows for more effective and less expensive WAN optimization, which improves network performance for a better user experience. SASE can also help reduce the number of appliances, routers, and circuits needed to connect users, sites, IoT devices, and more to the network.
The biggest challenge for enterprises considering SASE is bringing all components together to deliver a single, integrated solution that meets their needs. Choosing the right provider to consolidate networking and security capabilities is critical and challenging. For example, IT staff may be used to working with different teams for networking and security, and a SASE solution that brings them together could create some internal friction.
