Modern enterprise networks are expanding beyond a central data center, with remote users and sites like retail branches, warehouses, IoT systems, and remote home offices all demanding secure access. Choose a solution that integrates networking and security functions into a single platform. This ensures easy integration and unified management.
What is SASE?
SASE is a comprehensive, cloud-delivered security framework. It combines networking and numerous security capabilities into one service to reduce enterprise complexity, cost, and risk. A SASE architecture can deliver low latency and secure access to applications, data centers, and the Internet from a global network of points of presence (PoPs). Securing your networks with SASE allows you to reduce infrastructure complexity and increase performance. You can eliminate the need for MPLS lines, expensive data center hardware, and DMZs while providing access to business applications, cloud environments, and mobile devices. SASE offers scalability, so your network and security can grow together without compromising performance or security. With a SASE security solution, you can combine branch FWaaS with a secure web gateway, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), CASB, and advanced threat prevention into a single service that delivers consistent, end-to-end data protection. This can also reduce the number of point products your IT team must interact with and maintain, freeing them up to focus on more strategic initiatives. With SASE, you can also make work from anywhere possible. This means remote employees, IoT devices on industrial product lines, and hospital medical sensors can connect to the enterprise network and exchange data. This can increase productivity for employees working in different locations while ensuring the enterprise’s security controls are enforced for every device, user, and location on the network.
SASE’s Core Elements
SASE allows enterprises to bolster security capabilities while reducing the number of tools and platforms IT teams manage. With a modern SASE platform, networking and security technologies like SD-WAN, SWG, CASB, NGFW, DLP, and ZTNA are managed with centralized and unified management, removing the need for multiple software agents and delivering consistent network visibility. Combined, these capabilities significantly benefit organizations seeking to protect the edge and boost their work-from-anywhere capabilities. Unifying networking and security functions helps IT teams save time by simplifying the management environment. It also reduces risk by reducing the number of vendors IT teams must deal with and ensures consistent security enforcement. As well as boosting IT teams’ agility, SASE also improves the user experience for remote workers and mobile devices. This is achieved by allowing business applications to securely connect to cloud services at the network edge rather than being routed through a data center and back to the user’s device. Leading SASE solutions include security functions optimized for the edge, such as man-in-the-middle interceptions, spoofing, and secure encryption. They are also typically deployed over a globally distributed fabric of PoPs to provide low latency to remote offices, branch sites, and users. This means a more responsive and reliable solution for business applications and prevents data loss from the edge.
SASE’s Benefits
SASE brings a raft of benefits to manufacturers. It helps protect them from cyber attacks aimed at stealing sensitive information and disrupting operations by filtering URLs, DNS queries, and more. It helps ensure that only authorized users and devices gain access to applications and data. It reduces operational costs by allowing IT staff to spend less time deploying, configuring, and updating multiple-point solutions and more on strategic initiatives. It also simplifies IT management and reduces complexity by consolidating multiple-point products into a single, cloud-based security service. This allows enterprises to manage branch FWaaS, NGFW, secure web gateway, ZTNA, CASB, and DLP capabilities from one console. The SASE approach is more efficient than legacy models, which require multiple vendor tools to receive regular updates and be configured manually. It enables enterprises to scale their security architecture in line with business growth, and it is ideal for companies adopting new work models like remote and hybrid working. By eliminating the need for VPNs and DMZs, SASE makes it easier to securely connect employees and IoT/OT (Internet of things/operational technology) devices at the network edge. It also supports better performance, allowing applications to respond quickly to requests and avoiding bottlenecks. This is particularly important for industrial environments that must provide consistent QoE for various remotely located devices.
SASE’s Challenges
In today’s work-from-anywhere world, enterprises need solutions that securely connect remote users and devices to their business applications. They need solutions that meld networking services, typically based on SD-WAN, with security technologies such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to achieve that. ZTNA is the core technology of SASE, which eliminates perimeters and secures access to enterprise data by verifying the identity of users or devices rather than the location of the user’s IP address or device. This approach enables granular access policies and more effectively protects from insider threats, including lateral attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks, than traditional firewall or DMZ approaches. Achieving a complete SASE solution requires an integrated network architecture that is both simple and cost-effective. This means eliminating point solutions and integrating multiple technologies like SD-WAN, CASB, and VPNs into a single, integrated platform. It also means leveraging the cloud for critical components like caching and DNS security. This reduces management burdens on the IT team while providing centralized control over those elements that must remain in-house. Finally, implementing SASE requires that the teams responsible for networking and security work together to achieve a successful outcome. That can be a challenge, especially since networking and cybersecurity functions are often distinct groups with different management structures, cultures, vendors, and products. The right strategy and partner can make the journey easier, though.
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