SASE, made popular by Gartner’s model, has significantly improved the network security where the user’s location and time are no longer relevant. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a security framework for enabling fast and secure cloud adoption. It ensures that users and devices have secure cloud access to applications, services, and data, anywhere and any time.

As more efficiency is needed within organisations, they look for options to upgrade their security and risk management. However, implementing new approaches in these essential aspects add complexities — different products, shortage of skilled staff and more environments. If an organisation is not careful about the new dynamic changes it is making; it could quickly lose users, devices, and data.

SASE blends networking and network security into a single, cloud-delivered offering to support the needs of edge computing, business transformation and workforce mobility for organisations.

How Does SASE Work?

Half of the SASE is about network traffic, and the other half is about security or speed vs control. Organisations, today, face some of the biggest issues while dealing with new security challenges in the cloud environment. Frameworks based on Gartner’s SASE are designed to allow organisations’ cloud security experts to apply identity and context to specify the accurate level of performance, security, reliability and cost desired for every network session.

“The secure access service edge is an emerging offering combining comprehensive WAN capabilities with comprehensive network security functions (such as SWG, CASB, FWaaS, and ZTNA) to support the dynamic, secure access needs of digital enterprises.”

– Gartner

SASE combines WAN properties like secure web gateway, FAAS (firewall as a service), and cloud access security with network security functions. These features are basically delivered as a service to find sensitive data or malware, decrypt contents, and monitor risk and the trust level. 

For example, a SASE framework provides a structure to maintain higher access speed or performance in networks while managing control of users, devices, and data traversing networks. These benefits provided by SASE are vital when the sales force needs greater efficiency through mobility. When the sales force works on a public WiFi, there is always a security risk around, which makes it challenging to access corporate applications and data, the SASE framework successfully counters that too.

Some notable SASE vendors are Akamai, Cato Networks, Cloudflare, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, VMware etc.

Benefits

Implementing a SASE architecture holds these benefits:

• Agility: Enables digital business opportunities to share apps, services, data, and APIs with contractors and partners with less risk of exposure.
• Reduced Costs and Makes It Simple: SASE helps you reduce the number of components, vendors and competition which will lead to additional cost savings.
• Strong Network Performance: Organisations experience better network performance by using global WAN service with private backbone and built-in optimisation.
• More Reliable Security: By inspecting traffic and examining every data flow, security and the overall performance is increased. SASE provides mobile users, branch offices and retail locations with secure connectivity and irrespective of their location, thereby offering a single centralised view for an organisation’s network. This allows them to quickly identify users, devices and endpoints for monitoring activities. Following this, they can apply for their networking access with security policies and securely connect users to their applications and data in the cloud or on their device..
• Transparency: It offers fewer agents per device, and app bloat, which gives consistent applicate experience anywhere, anytime. Also, there is less operational overhead by updating for new threats and policies without new HW or SW.
• Local Enforcement: SASE provides centralised cloud management with decision-making and distributed implementation.