The Benefits of Adopting SASE for Your Organization

 

Many executives may be skeptical about security projects requiring heavy upfront investments or require ongoing management. Helping them understand the operational efficiencies and cost savings that SASE can deliver with a managed service model will go a long way in facilitating organizational adoption. A SASE solution deployed on a cloud infrastructure eliminates extra hardware costs like installation, warranties, repairs, and patching. It also enables your IT team to consolidate multiple point solutions on one platform and improve performance by connecting users worldwide with the lowest latency and most direct route.

Scalability and Elasticity

What are the benefits of SASE? SASE connects remote users to the company network without needing a traditional LAN or VPN. This is essential as more companies embrace the remote work model. SASE also helps ensure security for these employees, as it uses a distributed network architecture that includes secure gateways (SWG), cloud access security brokers (CASB), on-premises or firewalls as a service (FWaaS), and zero trust network access solutions (ZTNA). These technologies can all prevent cyber threats by filtering web traffic, blocking suspect behavior, enforcing company policies, and requiring real-time identity verification. By combining them in a SASE solution, companies can improve performance by optimizing network applications and reducing bandwidth bottlenecks. SASE can also simplify the management of these technologies as a single multitenant cloud platform. This can make it easier for IT teams to keep pace with user demands and maintain compliance. SASE eliminates the need for on-site hardware, reducing the risk of data breaches or maintenance issues that could impede operations. The cloud-based solution allows companies to scale up or down quickly to meet current demands without additional costs. For maximum flexibility, look for a provider that offers per-user subscriptions so you can dynamically adjust capacity as your business grows or shrinks. Consider a solution that supports multiple WAN links in case you need to add more connections.

Security

Today, organizations have many more ways to distribute data and information than they did in the past. Office workers work remotely, and cloud services connect users, apps, data, services, and devices across multiple sites and locations. In addition, edge devices like automobiles, refrigerators, web cameras, industrial product lines, and IoT sensors in health monitoring systems are connecting to corporate networks to exchange data. To prevent this information from being compromised, it’s essential that IT teams can protect the network from unauthorized access. This is where SASE comes into play. Unlike traditional approaches to networking and security that leverage centralized firewalls, SASE enables policy enforcement closer to the user and device. This reduces security complexity and the risk of a single point of failure and increases performance. SASE also eliminates the need to deploy and configure various security tools and appliances, reducing hardware and maintenance costs. And it allows IT to centrally manage all networking and security functions through a single, multitenant cloud platform that combines backbone and edge services, such as content delivery networks (CDNs), CASBs, virtual private network replacement, and SASE. However, SASE requires a different approach to managing security and a change in organizational mindset. This is where choosing a partner that can deliver a holistic zero-trust network architecture and provide managed security services will help IT avoid the risks of this transformational shift. A trusted MSSP can help with adoption planning, change management, and process alignment to accelerate a zero-trust security posture.

Mobility

While a SASE architecture can augment or replace an SD-WAN entirely, it is also designed to support mobility, the driving force behind digitalization and work-from-anywhere initiatives. SASE enables branch offices, remote workers, and other mobile employees to connect securely to applications, data centers, and other resources from anywhere with low latency using the best path available. It strengthens security with consistent policy enforcement and zero trust network access (ZTNA) while offering performance gains for WAN connections that are more reliable and secure. Unlike point products that require specialized skills and hardware for each function, SASE consolidates networking and security functions into a single multitenant cloud platform. That means centralized management makes changes much faster and eliminates the risk of isolated issues that can be difficult to identify and fix in disparate locations. With SASE, IT teams can be assigned consolidated role-based responsibilities and have complete visibility into the entire network. SASE can also reduce network complexity by minimizing the number of hardware appliances that IT must track and update, simplifying IT infrastructure, and reducing the total cost of ownership. By moving to SASE, IT can deliver a better user experience and accelerate business growth. This is why many organizations are already planning their SASE migration and are integrating it into their networking and cybersecurity projects over time.

Collaboration

SASE allows organizations to deploy network and security solutions as a unified platform. This approach provides a holistic set of capabilities that enable businesses to meet their security and performance goals, such as securing remote access to cloud and web apps or modernizing VPN connectivity for enterprise data protection. For example, many SASE offerings have a software-defined vast area network (SD-WAN) that delivers exceptional scalability and low latency across a diverse internet connection. This technology can also optimize network application performance by monitoring bandwidth and applying caching, compression algorithms, and protocol optimization to ensure optimal user and device performance. Similarly, security tools integrated into SASE architecture can prevent security threats from gaining entry to the network by analyzing contextual signals, such as user and device attributes, to identify whether a specific device can access the corporate infrastructure. This capability helps ensure that the right people and systems have access to the company’s most sensitive information and resources. SASE solutions can address various critical networking and security challenges, but deploying them requires collaboration from multiple teams within the organization. C-suite leaders, networking, and security teams should work together to identify key business priorities, explore potential solutions and implement SASE as a unified team with a common goal.

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