When evaluating SASE, performance often takes a back seat to features like threat detection, data loss prevention, or access control. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: performance is what determines whether all those capabilities actually get used – or quietly switched off.
It’s not just a technical concern. It’s also a business imperative.
The promise of SASE is compelling: unify security and networking into a single cloud-delivered platform. But that convergence also means your security stack is now in the data path. Every bit of latency, every drop in throughput – your users feel it.
And when they do, IT teams are forced into difficult decisions:
It’s the kind of erosion that’s hard to detect – until you realize your controls are no longer being fully enforced.
More than 80 percent of today’s web traffic is encrypted. TLS inspection is no longer optional. But decrypting and inspecting that traffic in real time is resource-intensive. Many vendors support it on paper – but not at scale.
When full inspection drags down throughput, organizations are often advised to bypass trusted applications like Microsoft 365 or Zoom. That may solve performance issues, but it weakens your security posture. Data exfiltration, malicious payloads, and policy violations don’t respect application reputations.
Independent performance tests have shown that HTTPS throughput capacity can vary by more than threefold between SSE vendors – especially when full inspection is enabled.
User experience is often the first casualty of underperforming SASE platforms. In a world where applications are real-time, users are mobile, and your network edge is everywhere, performance is foundational to building trust in your infrastructure.
If your SASE solution can’t handle encrypted traffic without slowing everything down, users lose confidence – and administrators lose control.
Beyond a degraded user experience, performance challenges introduce operational and financial burdens, such as:
These costs accumulate quietly, often under the radar, until the architecture becomes difficult to scale or secure effectively.
Latency is also a major issue, particularly in WAN environments. AI applications often require real-time data processing, and any delay can impact performance and outcomes. To reduce delays, 64% of enterprises are deploying AI workloads at the edge, closer to where data is generated and used.
As more organizations deploy AI-driven tools, real-time collaboration platforms, and cloud-based development environments, the performance burden on SASE infrastructure will only increase.
AI inference, real-time video collaboration, and low-latency application requirements demand high throughput and low jitter. A SASE platform already strained by basic TLS inspection won’t be ready for what’s next.
AI is To avoid surprises and future-proof your deployment, ask:
The answers will quickly reveal whether your solution is built for performance – or built around limitations.
It used to be that uptime defined reliability. Today, it’s performance. Always-on means little if the experience is always slow. And in the context of SASE, slow is more than inconvenient, it’s a vulnerability.
Security controls that degrade performance are often the first to be relaxed, bypassed, or disabled. That makes performance not just a feature, but a prerequisite. SASE should simplify and secure. If it can’t do that quickly, it won’t do it effectively.
To see how Versa performs under real-world conditions, explore the latest SSE evaluation from CyberRatings.org or Schedule a Versa SASE Demo to experience secure, high-performance access at scale
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