How SASE Transforms Network Security and Performance for Businesses

With remote workers and data in the cloud, security is top of mind for many organizations. SASE addresses these challenges with four core security capabilities.

Policies are based on identity and other contexts, including device, location, time of day, risk/trust assessment, application, and data sensitivity. This allows for efficient, meshed traffic handling that eliminates single points of failure.

Scalability

As organizations expand their business and operations, they need flexible and scalable security. Using SASE, IT and security teams can take a proactive stance against emerging threats. They can also improve user experiences and create a more agile and resilient IT infrastructure.

Unlike traditional network architecture, which relies on point-product hardware to establish a perimeter around the data center, SASE shifts the focus from entities to users and their applications. SASE provides advanced security and SD-WAN functionality with low latency by delivering consistent cloud-based capabilities via distributed points of presence (PoPs).

Traffic is routed to these SASE PoPs, which secure traffic based on the policies set by IT managers from a central management platform. Then, the SASE provider enforces access control based on identity and context instead of location and IP address for more fine-grained authorization. This eliminates the need for VPNs and DMZs and provides more robust security without requiring more hardware on the enterprise’s network.

SASE also offers a more agile way for organizations to connect their employees, partners, and customers to critical applications. This eliminates the need for them to rely on traditional security tools like VPNs, which degrade performance and increase an organization’s attack surface by exposing IP addresses. It enables them to connect securely to the Internet and quickly access SaaS applications, websites, cloud services, IoT devices, and other edge devices.

Flexibility

The network must be secure as users connect from remote locations, business data centers, and cloud services. This is a challenge when traditional security architecture models rely on a secure perimeter requiring traffic routed through hub or data center firewalls for inspection, verification, and access control. This “hairpinning” results in poor performance and can limit productivity for remote users.

SASE architecture turns this legacy model on its head by integrating advanced SD-WAN and security capabilities into a service fabric deployed close to the user. This enables networking and security functions to be delivered as one service at SASE points of presence (PoPs). This approach reduces operational complexity, provides a better user experience, and shrinks the potential attack surface.

Using a security-driven policy framework, SASE allows only contextual access for users, applications, devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT) connected to the PoPs. Identity is the most critical context for a SASE security policy, but location, time of day, and risk/trust posture of connecting devices also drive access decisions.

Security teams constantly battle to keep up with mutating threats and new encryptions. By reducing the number of appliances and point solutions on the network, SASE improves security team monitoring and response times. Moreover, integrating network and security services into a single SASE solution simplifies management for IT teams that may be responsible for both networking and security.

Performance

Unlike point-product security tools (such as secure gateways, cloud access security brokers, and firewalls) that focus on individual functions, SASE delivers all these capabilities in one solution, eliminating the need for separate appliances at each network edge. This reduces overall system management and security overhead and allows IT or security teams to craft and manage consistent policies for securing everything that connects to the network—users, mobile devices, IoT sensors on industrial product lines, containerized microservices, serverless applications, and more.

The SASE framework also eliminates the scalability meltdown, complexity, and latency associated with traditional hub-and-spoke VPN architecture. By authenticating users, applying security policies on a transaction-by-transaction basis, and granting least-privilege access, SASE improves performance by reducing the attack surface.

The platform also enables enterprises to deploy security and SD-WAN capabilities at points of presence (PoPs) worldwide, avoiding the need to route traffic over the public Internet. This minimizes network latency and WAN costs while delivering an optimal end-user experience. Finally, SASE has a single software-defined WAN service with a global backbone that provides WAN optimization to deliver the highest level of performance for business applications. This approach is a game changer for organizations seeking to support work-from-anywhere initiatives while maintaining enterprise-level security for all users and devices. Learn more about how SASE can transform your business by contacting us today to request a demo.

Security

SASE consolidates network and security functions into a single platform to strengthen security and improve performance. This eliminates the need to deploy and manage multiple networking and security point solutions (like firewalls, CASBs, NGFWs, etc.), which add complexity and latency.

Securing the WAN is an ongoing challenge for digital organizations. Existing approaches and technologies don’t offer granular access control for distributed work and cloud applications. Instead, they leave a broad attack surface that hackers can exploit.

SASE leverages Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) as a network security platform to enable granular visibility and fine control of systems and users accessing enterprise applications and services. ZTNA replaces the traditional perimeter approach with an identity-based model better suited for a remote and mobile workforce.

In addition, SASE can deliver a scalable, secure, and low-latency solution for quickly deploying and activating new connections. It also frees IT from spending time on cumbersome maintenance tasks like patching and hardware replacements to focus on what’s essential: business-enabling technology. Finally, SASE eliminates the need to constantly worry about backhaul connectivity, a common cause of performance degradation with legacy VPN solutions.