In this Article:
- What is SASE – Secure Access Service Edge?
- The Benefits of SASE
- What are the advantages of SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) Model
- The Growth Of SASE Adoption
- Conclusion – Why SASE (Secure Access Service Edge)is the need of the hour
What is SASE – Secure Access Service Edge?
SASE – pronounced “sassy” is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service. SASE – Secure access service edge enables secure connectivity while using cloud and even on-premise. It is a network architecture that combines software-defined WAN capabilities and cloud-native network security services including zero-trust network access, secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers and firewalls as a service.
SASE framework allows enterprise security professionals to identify and specify performance reliability, security, and cost desired for every session while using network connectivity. In simple terms, SASE is an agile methodology that allows to achieve zero trust policies in a cloud-native environment.
Touted by Gartner as the future of network security, By 2024, at least 40% of enterprises will have explicit strategies to adopt SASE, up from less than 1% at year-end 2018 – predicts Gartner.
The Benefits of SASE
SASE leverages increased security in Cloud. It has been noticed that enterprises which use SASE benefit from it because of the increased speed and scalability, all the while addressing the security challenges that are generally seen in distributed cloud-based environments. SASE is becoming popular because of the “verify, then trust” approach it follows. This zero trust approach emphasizes the protection of critical IP rather than simply trusting the users on a particular network by default. It follows a strict identity verification for every single user and every device regardless of the network zone or location. This allows for better segmentation and control over each application and each user explicitly.
What are the advantages of SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) Model
Top benefits of the SASE Model are:
- Ease of use
- Transparency
- Effective network access and network security
- Best performance through latency-optimized routing
- Zero trust network access enablement
- Superior quality of service
- Risk-driven security controls
- Globally distributed & cloud-native architecture
- Edge enforcement with centralized policy
- Autoscaling
- Eliminating hardware refresh cycles & capacity planning
The Growth Of SASE (Secure Access Service Edge)Adoption
Derek Brost, Director, Professional Services – Security & Compliance at Intervision states “While SASE (secure access service edge) is the peak of Gartner’s “Hype Cycle,” it will continue to gain adoption as organizations move past the quick response measures they enacted this year for their massive and unexpected increase in remote worker connectivity.”
SASE allows for a reduction in complexity and cost. Based on the rapidly changing business needs,
SASE meets business needs by allowing it to scale up or down. While the above-mentioned benefits may seem phenomenal, most IT organizations are not fully prepared to adopt SASE.
Organisations face cultural challenges since most of them might have separate networking and security teams. A move that involves coordination between two teams can sometimes turn out to be a jarring experience. Derek Brost says that “Many IT networking groups unfortunately found the strain and limits of their remote access VPN concentrators and, even after overcoming or addressing those breaking points, they next coped with emerging issues in their bandwidth constraints, lack of network segmentation, weakness in endpoint security solutions and myriad untrusted devices connecting to sensitive corporate systems.”
One of the other main factors limiting SASE adoption is that only 4% of the organisations have migrated entirely to cloud, leaving a majority of organisations yet to be cloud and SASE ready.
Conclusion – Why SASE is the need of the hour
Although SASE adoption can be challenging, the pay off for companies who adopt this is huge. IT groups must budget and start planning for a converged, integrated cloud-based approach to enable remote device, workforce and distributed security technology.
Recent surveys have shown that 67% of the organisations will be SASE ready by the summer of 2022. 1 in 4 organisations are looking to migrate applications to cloud and in turn adopt SASE. The main focus currently is overcoming the barrier of lack of skills and management complexity and moving towards SASE work atmosphere. Organisations must communicate that security functions are now being increasingly inserted to protect workloads. That’s when zero trust access can be enabled and will be seen as a journey, not a hindrance.
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