Why SASE matters for modern organizations
SASE’s flexibility also enables small businesses with unified network and security teams to scale their infrastructure easily while maintaining low total cost of ownership (TCO). For large multinational companies with mature SOC and NOC operations and separate security and networking teams, a SASE solution unifies the data in order to manage and troubleshoot with much greater efficiency.
SASE’s benefits extend beyond what legacy security architectures provide by integrating identity and context. A SASE platform also allows security policies to be delivered consistently and ubiquitously by applying a zero trust policy for every connection between entities and the apps and services they are trying to access, so organizations can meet both industry compliance requirements as well as their defined security standards.
The evolution of SASE solutions
With this in mind, let’s take a look at the top 10 things to look for in a SASE architecture in order to select an offering that can deliver the security benefits your security policy requires while simultaneously providing a single pane of glass for management with the networking performance and scale your business requires.
10 essential SASE architecture requirements
Ecosystem integration and cloud flexibility
- The solution must be able to coexist within any ecosystem, meaning it should be able to be integrated in any brownfield environment with existing security and network solutions.
- The solution must be built on a secure architecture. It must also have the flexibility and scalability required for deployment within any cloud environment such as Equinix, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, and others.
- The solution should support running in containers/microservices and bare-metal devices with the ability to scale out for maximum performance.
- The solution must be multi-service capable and be cloud-native and should have multi-tenant capabilities at scale.
Policy management and intelligent enforcement
- The solution must have centralized policy configuration and management with distributed security enforcement. This should provide policy enforcement via strategically placed, globally available points of presence (PoPs).
- The solution must be AI/ML-driven and able to identify and utilize the security policy enforcement point that is closest to the user or device from which the application access is being requested.
- The solution must have a robust intrusion detection and prevention security stack that is coupled with an advanced Firewall-as-a-Service (also known as Next Generation Firewall) that provides a multitude of classification and detection capabilities, along with policy enforcement mechanisms.
Unified networking and security capabilities
- The solution must combine software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), routing, and encryption with security capabilities in a single operating system in order to deliver the best user and application experience while also enforcing all aspects of security. The solution should also employ a traffic-engineered backbone (interconnected PoPs) in order to provide an optimized user experience.
- The solution must have an analytics engine that provides full visibility for every component of the SASE ecosystem, including work-from-anywhere entities.
- It must be delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and be elastic so that it dynamically scales to your needs and provides an optimized performance.
Scalability and operational flexibility
Unified, single vendor, and integrated SASE solutions are increasingly favored over disaggregated and multi-product solutions. These types of solutions are allowing organizations of all sizes to adopt SASE architectures and transition to this new all-purpose, fully integrated networking and cybersecurity approach.
They are seeing the results of unifying their systems, protecting the business, simplifying ongoing maintenance, and saving money. This allows today’s hybrid work organizations to adopt a flexible workstyle while keeping the wave of cybercrime in check.
Jon Taylor leads Versa’s security evangelism and training, working directly with partners and customers. Before joining Versa, he was a Senior Systems Engineer at Palo Alto Networks, supporting enterprise customers and running technical programs, spent several years in a global business development role at Cisco Systems that spanned its security product and global sales organizations, and worked as a network architect, engineer, and administrator.