Industry Insights

Essential benefits of single vendor SASE

Enterprises have bought into the benefits of SASE. When implemented right, with the right vendor, it makes the network more efficient and more secure while reducing total cost of ownership. A win, win, win! According to a recent press release by Dell’Oro Group the 5-Year SASE Forecast Reaches $97B. But why is single vendor unified SASE significantly more beneficial than just SDWAN + SSE from different vendors?

The many issues stem from the fact that it requires twice the effort to use two separate products along with the need for customization where integration points are not standards based. Training, provisioning, integration, management, troubleshooting, network tuning, and security operations correlation, detection and response efforts are all compounded. Here’s a list of the top 10 considerations:

1. Lower Implementation Costs

Using single vendor SASE lowers implementation costs

• IT team do not have to learn products from 2 different vendors
• They do not need to provision 1,000s of IPSEC tunnels manually for each branch or data center to access SSE gateways
• Also, by using unified policies they do not need to create custom policies to integrate separate network and security systems

2. Lower Operational Costs

Using single vendor SASE lowers operational costs by saving time and money

• IT team do not have to use multiple consoles to monitor network and security activities
• They do not have to contact support at different vendors
• They do not need to implement software patches for vulnerabilities from different vendors

3. Improve SecOps Efficiency

Using single vendor SASE improves Security Operations efficiency

• With two vendors SecOps teams are challenged to correlate network and security events
• Breach response is delayed with multiple systems and consoles
• Threat intelligence from multiple vendors is inconsistent and disjoined

4. Security Event Correlation

Using single vendor SASE avoids the need for separate security event correlation.

• Investigations are faster and more accurate without the need to correlate events from two vendors
• Single vendor agentic AI can give automated actionable alerts with clear response guidance with a single vendor LLM

5. Enhanced Adaptive Identity

Using single vendor SASE enhances adaptive identity

• 2 different vendors do not have the same view of users and they may need to reauthenticate at the SSE gateway
• SSE gateways configured to identify users by IP address may not have up to date assignments to map their security policies
• Identifying indicators of compromise like unrealistic travel becomes challenging

6. Segmentation

Using single vendor SASE enables comprehensive segmentation

• Enables device level micro-segmentation action like blocking rogue IOT devices
• Enables application-level segmentation across flows through SSE gateways to enforce zero trust principles
• Enables network level segmentation through transport and awareness of SGT tags

7. Unified Architecture

Using single vendor SASE improves traffic steering  using a unified architecture

• No traffic hair-pinning with direct routing between the network and SSE gateways
• No extra hops between traffic forwarding and security processing nodes to add latency, loss or jitter
• No extra latency from backhauled flows between clients and their destination

8. Troubleshooting

Using single vendor SASE reduces troubleshooting time and effort

• Teams work with consistent view of their environment with unified network and security logs and alerts
• Teams eliminate time intensive manual investigations and guesswork
• They avoid challenges and inefficiencies from working with multiple vendor support teams with different perspectives

9. Forwarding Performance

Using single vendor SASE improves forwarding performance

• Harness the full power of transport over SD-WAN, that manual IPSEC tunnels do not provide including traffic shaping, policing, acceleration, QOS, forward error correction, packet cloning, multipath load balancing with SLA monitoring , etc.
• Eliminate convoluted work arounds to direct user traffic to SSE gateways with PAC files, routing tricks, and scripting

10. Resource Routing

Using single vendor SASE  improves routing to target resources

• SSE security processing gateways can dynamically learn routes and forward flows to data centers or hyperscalers
• And similar forwarding performance benefits over SD-WAN at the access leg that manual IPSEC tunnels do not provide including traffic shaping, policing, acceleration, QOS, forward error correction, packet cloning, multipath load balancing with SLA monitoring , etc.

Versa

Versa’s Universal SASE platform, VersaONE, provides security and networking in a centrally managed single vendor managed platform.

• All network and security functions are controlled through one console and a single set of policies to manage, ensuring consistent policy configuration, management, and enforcement across customer’s entire networks.
• It provides embedded inline threat detection and response, data security, filtering throughout the network and continuously verifies the identity and security posture of every client ensuring real-time defense.
• All security and network telemetry are funneled into one data lake, enabling comprehensive visibility and advanced analytics. Built on a single operating system.
• VersaONE delivers high performance, a single-pass scanning architecture, and simplified software maintenance, enabling organizations to operate their infrastructure more efficiently.

Summary

The benefits of single vendor unified SASE are clear.  Using a different vendor for SDWAN and SSE equates to twice the effort in training, provisioning, management, troubleshooting, and correlating security events. Validated by partners, providers, and customers VersaONE single vendor unified SASE eliminates the issues with using multiple vendors point products and delivers an optimal unified networking and security service.