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SASE is the simplest, most scalable way to continuously secure and connect the millions points of access in and out of the corporate resources regardless of location.
Product Marketing Manager, Versa Networks
February 17, 2021
With Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) emerging more as an effective solution to address today’s networking and security challenges, Versa Networks CEO, Kelly Ahuja and CMO, Mike Wood, discussed five customers real world SASE deployment case studies in a live webcast.
For those unable to attend the webcast or didn’t have the time to watch the recording, we thought it would be beneficial to provide summary.
A quick recap:the need for aModern Secure Network
As more businesses transition to a multi-cloud strategy, manage a Work-from-Anywhere (WFA) workforce, and embrace a rapidly growing 5G network, modernizing the network becomes more of a necessity. With an explosive increase of users, devices, and locations, organizations need to provide optimal connectivity and comprehensive security for all their users accessing private and public cloud services. By building secure access all the way to a service’s edge, enterprises can guarantee an SLA for user experience and deliver security with consistent user-to-app policies no matter who and where the users are. Let’s look at how these five customers deployed and benefitted from SASE.
Five different customers, one secure approach
Customer #1: A Fortune 2000 enterprise with 97 sites around the world and 2500+ users.
This customer saw a sudden increase in users connecting remotely to the office. Their international users had to traverse through the enterprise datacenter to get to cloud applications which affected their application performance. Additionally, IT lacked application visibility and control for those users and did not have enough specialized professionals dedicated to security despite being a decently sized organization. This enterprise chose to deploy SASE equally between on-premises and in the cloud. The results showed a 20% improvement in security policy agility, a 3x improvement on application performance, and a 60% reduction in latency. Moreover, their IT team was able to focus more on planning as opposed to continually going back and updating security policies manually to reflect their everchanging network.
Customer #2: A Fortune 1000 enterprise with 357 sites around the world and 10.5K+ users
Being a financial enterprise, this organization required their users to be on-premises to have access to their work. In the small instances where they had remote users, remote users couldn’t access the cloud directly and would have to connect to their virtual desktops for access. When deploying SASE, this customer chose to do so completely on-premises. They deployed SD-WAN and security for branches which allowed remote users to connect directly to the closest branch or home offices. As a result, all their branch locations turned into the equivalent of a gateway delivering SASE services. This financial firm was able to see a 50x increase in branch bandwidth capacity, a 200% improvement in application performance, a 4x reduction in blackouts, and continued to be 100% compliant with regulatory requirements.
Customer #3: A Fortune 500 enterprise with sites in more than 120 countries and 30K+ users
As mobile and remote users working from anywhere increased, this large enterprise were faced with poor application experience, security that did not extend to their users or cloud gateways, and high operational expenses as their initial resolution was to provide on-premise VPN appliances for their remote users. At the end, this business chose to deploy a hybrid model of SASE; on-premises and in the cloud. Deploying SASE provided their users a self-service onboarding process – users can self-provision their device with the enterprise’s authentication service. This removed a lot of the onboarding process for IT as that was time-consuming and simplified the onboarding experience for its employees. They were able to achieve a 3x reduction in appliance sprawl, a 10x faster adoption of authentication, and a 60% reduction in annual costs.
Customer #4: A small-medium enterprise with 1 HQ, 17 remote offices, and 200+ users
With about 200 employees, it was important for this business to avoid upfront capital spending. Most of their users and devices accessed the corporate HQ to get to the internet while remote users connected via VPN. With a lean IT team, they didn’t have many specialized resources which also meant their security was a challenge. To combat this challenge, this organization went with 100% SASE via cloud. They were able to deploy SD-WAN with integrated SASE services all via the cloud, covering their corporate office, remote offices, and remote users. With Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), they benefitted from a unified and consistent model for their user and application policies, independent of location. They were able to save 80% in costs, a 2x increase in policy management, a 75% improvement in productivity, and improved their network management, being co-managed by a partner working with a single dashboard for all of their networking and security solutions.
Customer #5: A Fortune 50 enterprise with 400 corporate sites, 200 field sites, and 50K+ users
Among its 50,000+ users, this large enterprise was providing connectivity and access from its WFA consultants, contractors, and employees to its corporate and cloud resources. Before deploying SASE, this enterprise dealt with a complex and disjointed infrastructure, had a variety of globally distributed WFA users, and faced the challenge of providing their contractors with access to their private network as well as the enterprise’s private cloud. By deploying SASE as a blended approach via the cloud and on-premises, this enterprise was able to provide a pre-login for users and devices to get onboarded for corporate access. Contractors were able to access both their own private network as well as the enterprise’s corporate access. The results amounted to 70% reduction in time to onboard users and devices, 30% cost reduction, 10x increase in visibility, and 2x improvement in productivity.
So, what’s the big takeaway?
Contrary to how often SASE is presented as only a cloud-delivered solution, SASE is most commonly deployed as a blended implementation. As seen with the customer examples above, a number of them decided to deploy via the cloud and on-premises while others leveraged a 100% cloud model or a 100% on-premise model.
SASE is the modern approach to networking and security, no matter what the enterprise looks like. Customers come in all shapes and sizes as do each of their sites and are all able to benefit from SASE.
Best-of-breed SASE is offered in a single software stack – integrating all SASE services within the same image to enable high performance, increase security, and lower latency. This also means having a single management interface and single policy engine, where IT teams can have their security, application, business, and user policies configured and managed in the same dashboard. Importantly, IT should take advantage of SASE with a single-pass parallel processing architecture, removing the complexities of managing multiple appliances and management consoles. In order to choose the right SASE offering, understanding how SASE is delivered is crucial.
With the distribution of users, devices, and applications growing, it is only becoming more evident that a modern secure network based on SASE is the solution. Better security hygiene, optimized network performance, assured application experience, and reduced IT complexities – these are all the benefits that can be achieved with a SASE network.
