With the rise of the pandemic, many businesses have started working from home. Also, the new unwritten norm for employees is to work remotely instead of confining them to physical buildings with centralized data centers.
With this remote working setup, network bottleneck and VPN latency arise. I’m sure you have been there as well. Let’s look into how you can overcome these issues with an all-in-one integrated solution in the name of SASE.
But before diving into SASE, let’s focus on the pitfalls of the current infrastructure that lead to SASE.
Limitations of traditional Hub-and-Spoke Architecture
By now, you may know that a centralized data center to manage all your in-house network infrastructure and mitigate security threats from cyber attacks is no longer the center of the universe.
Dozens of years ago, even if you were working from home or remotely, you connected to the data center using a Virtual Private Network(VPN) installed on your devices. Furthermore, if you are in a different branch, you could connect to the data center using MPLS.
This model worked quite well until the cloud came along. Many organizations utilized SaaS(Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) instead of using applications and infrastructure on their data centers. However, still, there was a need to communicate with the centralized data centers for network and security management.
It didn’t make sense and created a slew of problems, including delays that hurt application performance and the use of expensive leased line bandwidth. So why not entirely depend on the cloud for network infrastructure and even security? This is where SASE comes to the equation.
What is SASE in a nutshell?
Gartner introduced the concept SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) in the summer of 2019. It’s a cloud-delivered service paradigm that blends WAN (Wide Area Network) edge network functions with network security services that the cloud already delivers, like FWAAS, CASB, and Zero Trust.
You may already know that none of these WAN edge network functions and cloud network security services are new. They already exist in the cloud. It’s just the integration of them that has given them the name SASE or ‘sassy’ as it’s pronounced.
Overview of WAN edge and cloud-delivered security services
Some of the primary components of WAN edge functions include:
- SD-WAN: it routes to communicate with the world outside the WAN fabric.
- Essential security functions to protect each of the devices connected to the cloud such as:
- Zone-Based Firewall (ZB FW)
- Advanced Segmentation
- IDS/IPS
- WAN Optimization: this enhances the user experience of the devices connected to the cloud by increasing throughput and minimizing latency and packet loss.
These WAN edge functionalities are married with cloud-delivered security functions that you would find helpful. They include Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Assess Security Broker (CASBY), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), SandBox (the ability to run an executable file in a protected environment before passing it to its final destination), antivirus intrusion detection and more.
Why Use SASE?
Still, are you wondering why you should use SASE? As you have discovered in the section above, as more employees started working remotely, the conventional hub-and-spoke model became inefficient. As a result, more rapid adoption of an intellectual application-ware, software-driven or software-defined for WAN edge is essential.
Then how about the security?
With an escalating number of employees connecting to the cloud apps remotely, conventional perimeter-based security proved to be insufficient. So it was required to integrate WAN and security functionalities to ensure direct and secure access to applications and services across multi-cloud environments irrespective of location or devices used to access them.
Why SASE security is a must
The principal purpose of SASE security is to facilitate and streamline security by combining various tasks into a single service. This provides your security teams with complete visibility into your network architecture.
With this enhanced visibility comes the possibility of discovering previous security risks in your organization’s IT system that you have not detected before. Prepare to analyze and address these unforeseen concerns, such as security breaches, poorly functioning Internet circuits, shadow IT services, and accidentally authorized traffic flows, when migrating to SASE.
How could your business benefit from SASE?
Zero Trust
Zero trust eliminates the idea of trust entirely from a network. As a result, you must undergo a content check before allowing access to a company’s data and network. This means that you should have secure access to all resources regardless of location; administrators should implement access restrictions and examine and log traffic.
Enables agility
Invites new digital business scenarios like APIs, services, and applications, allowing new data to be shared with partners and contractors while posing minimum security risks.
It removes complexity and reduces costs
Unlike legacy systems, your IT team will be free of the burden of infrastructure maintenance. Furthermore, by simplifying the network and security stacks and integrating different solutions, expensive acquisitions and in-house maintenance and management are eliminated.
A vigorous moment with enhanced performance
With SASE, adding new resources and capabilities is straightforward. All that is required is deploying an edge client, connection to the SASE platform, and corporate regulations drive the network and security experience. Your IT teams no longer have to maintain on-premises infrastructure and instead focus on driving business development.
Enhanced security through a uniform policy
All edges benefit from uniform policy protection with a comprehensive security stack integrated into the SASE’s underlying architecture. Because all WAN and Internet traffic travels via the SASE Cloud, it seems to have complete insight into the network. There are no gaps, and SASE can easily retain control of the whole network through a single view.
Conclusion
After going through this article, I’m sure you may now have a comprehensive overview of why SASE is vital for your organization. If your organization still possesses a traditional centralized data center system, now is the time to move on to the SASE environment.
We hope you found this article helpful when your organization needs to adapt to the SASE environment.
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