By Bob Olsen - Senior Solutions Architect
Enterprise networks are changing. The days when network users, applications, and services resided primarily within a businesses’ walls and fences have passed. Companies are increasingly challenged to provide secure, network access to remote users (teleworkers) regardless of location. Adoption of public and private cloud services means that traditional enterprise data center services are no longer exclusively hosted in the corporate data centers. These trends have redefined the Internet ‘edge’ making it difficult for companies to effectively manage and secure their networks.
Secure Access Services Edge, or more commonly known as SASE (pronounced ‘SASSY’), is a term coined by Gartner in August 2019. SASE describes a network framework that addresses today’s needs by providing a set of services and applications that combine cloud-based security and SD-WAN capabilities. Security policies are centrally managed and enforced based on four factors:
Identity (person, application, service, or device)
Context (device security posture, resource/application access requirements)
Policies (corporate security and compliance)
Session (ongoing assessment of risk)
A new and evolving framework, SASE vendors are bringing their own solutions and services to the market. While specific offerings may differ, SASE is typically defined as being composed of five main technologies
Integrated, cloud-based SD-WAN
Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS)
Cloud-Access Security Broker (CASB)
Secure Web Gateway (SWG)
Zero-Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
How can SASE benefit organizations and users?
Support for the migration of data and applications to the cloud
Secure and centralized management for expanding remote workforces
Improved application performance
Distributed security inspection and policy enforcement
Single Pane-of-Glass management
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