SASE plays a critical role in ensuring that security can be delivered anywhere, including at the WAN edge, cloud edge, data center (DC) edge, core edge, and endpoint devices.
Country Manager, India & SAARC,
Fortinet
Providing secure, reliable, and consistent access to corporate assets and applications for the hybrid workforce is one of the biggest challenges facing IT teams today. Secure, authenticated access to critical applications and resources combined with consistent enterprise-grade protection, whether users are on-premises, working from home, or somewhere in between, is crucial.
Identifying Security gaps
The modern hybrid workforce has introduced new networking and security challenges that organizations must address to ensure a robust security posture and a network infrastructure that meets the enterprise’s and its users’ dynamic needs. Often, network and security teams address different business needs with “one-off” point solutions, such as a standalone router to provide Internet connectivity at a branch location and a small firewall appliance to provide secure connectivity to the Internet, the public cloud, and the corporate data centre.
Unfortunately, these approaches often create gaps in the organization’s security posture and introduce other challenges, such as:
Inconsistent security policies and controls: Lack of a centralized management console for siloed security tools often leads to inconsistent and potentially insufficient enforcement of security policies and application of security controls. Applying and enforcing consistent policies, whether a user is on-network or off-network, is challenging. This negatively impacts user experience and productivity.
Inefficient use of network resources: Multiple direct Internet access (DIA) links are often provisioned for branch locations to ensure connectivity if a link fails. Depending on the networking equipment used, these configurations may not support load balancing, traffic prioritization – that is, quality of service or (QoS), automated failover/failback, and ther advanced networking capabilities. Different firewalls and other security tooling on the various DIA links also create additional security challenges.
Lack of onsite expertise: Branch locations don’t always have local IT resources to troubleshoot networking and security issues when they inevitably arise. Practically every organization today must work with limited budget resources and workforce, especially in the security profession. Remote access options may be limited for many point solutions, requiring IT staff to use third-party remote access tools which may introduce new risks to the enterprise IT environment.
Increased complexity: Managing disparate solutions from different vendors is challenging. It requires limited IT and security staff to learn specialized skills and new interfaces to operate each of the various tools. Complexity leads to a greater risk of security misconfigurations and requires more time to troubleshoot when issues arise.
VPN Performance Issues: Virtual private networks (VPNs) have traditionally been used to provide secure connectivity between remote user endpoints (including branch, mobile, and other locations) and corporate networks. Unfortunately, VPNs have notoriously been plagued with many performance and usability issues. Additionally, VPNs have traditionally been configured for all-or-nothing access: If a device is trusted that is, connected to the VPN, then it has access to the entire network, which means a compromised device may compromise the entire network.
Converging Networking and Security
Modern networks have evolved and today are nothing like the networks most security solutions were originally designed to protect. During the early stages of hybrind work the main focus for enterprises was to provide connectivity for remote workers. This focus has now shifted to provide increased performance, greater efficiency, and improved security, which require enterprises to rethink their security strategy and posture. The notion of a perimeter has all but disappeared as users now commonly access corporate resources while working from anywhere — the corporate office, a branch location, a home office, coffee shop, even from an airport or hotel. And the resources they access aren’t necessarily in a corporate data center.
IT resources including business-critical applications and workloads are increasingly hosted in public clouds. Even with aggressive public cloud adoption, existing private clouds have not been fully displaced. Enterprises are not yet ready to completely give up on their on-premises data centers, leading to hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments composed of several public cloud vendors.
These highly dynamic environments are expansive and constantly evolving to support an organization’s digital acceleration efforts, work-from-anywhere (WFA) strategies, and other top business priorities. In response to these rapid changes, many security and network teams have become accustomed to overlaying point security solutions onto their hybrid networks. Yet doing so has led to increased management complexity, performance bottlenecks, poor user experience, and the potential introduction of new exploitable gaps or vulnerabilities.
However, hybrid, rapidly evolving networks are here to stay, so a better approach to security and networking is needed. To ensure consistent connectivity and security for users everywhere, networking and security solutions must converge at the edges and in the cloud. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) consolidates networking and security capabilities and functions in a single, cloud-delivered solution. SASE’s goal is to support the dynamic, secure access needs of today’s organizations. SASE plays a critical role in ensuring that security can be delivered anywhere, including at the WAN edge, cloud edge, data center (DC) edge, core edge, and endpoint devices used by today’s hybrid workforce.
Single-vendor SASE the delivery of networking and security capabilities from one vendor in a unified solution is a prime example of consolidation that helps network and security teams drive operational efficiency, reduce costs, and eliminate needless complexity.
