Conquer Cybersecurity Challenges in the Cloud with SASE
Organizations risk constantly falling behind with their cybersecurity defenses in a rapidly evolving digital universe. Too often, they effectively play security whack-a-mole, implementing disparate solutions that require careful integrations with one another. This costs time and money and can even decrease security as those clunky solutions become outdated. Fortunately, a concept called SASE exists to streamline this process with a modern approach and cutting-edge cybersecurity technology.
What is SASE? What does it stand for, who created it, and who needs it?
Let’s dive in.
What is SASE?
SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge. Introduced by Gartner in 2019, SASE (pronounced “sassy”) is a cloud-based cybersecurity concept that combines network security functions with wide area networking (WAN) capabilities.
In other words, SASE is a way of simplifying management, reducing complexity, and increasing operational speed and efficiency for cybersecurity protections in the cloud.
Because it’s deployed in the cloud, its capabilities can be deployed flexibly (whenever needed) instead of building a perimeter around your data with many different appliances that provide security only at single points and need to be stitched together. This is a smart approach for a distributed workforce with cloud-based applications, so SASE is primarily delivered as a service.
Here are the key components of SASE:
SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) is a type of networking that enables organizations to securely connect users, applications, and data across large geographical distances, aka WANs. Doing so provides centralized control and visibility over the entire network.
FWaaS (Firewall as a Service) is cloud-based firewall protection that provides a barrier around your business's critical digital components. It is like a hardware firewall on-premise but for your cloud, and it can scale… fast.
CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) ensures that all traffic between your on-premise and cloud solutions complies with your organization’s security policies. According to Gartner, the four pillars of CASB are visibility (so you can detect non-compliant IT practices), data security (so you can keep your data safe), threat protection (so you can block external threats like malware), and compliance (to help you meet industry regulations).
ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) means that you are continually applying zero trust verification and inspection capabilities. When ZTNA is used, access to applications or resources is granted after the ZTNA service has authenticated the user.
SWG (Secure Web Gateway) ensures that your users/employees don’t interact with bad web content that could increase the risk of a network breach. SWG sits between your users/employees and the internet to filter traffic and enforce your acceptable use and security policies.
With the fast, flexible, comprehensive, and proactive way that SASE helps organizations focus on effective security measures, it’s no surprise that the global SASE market is poised for tremendous growth, predicted to go from $1.23B in 2022 to $20.10 billion by 2031.
Do I need SASE?
SASE is well suited for organizations that operate in the fast-moving modern economy. To keep pace with the demands and opportunities, these organizations will likely have distributed workforces, which requires them to utilize cloud applications extensively. This interconnectedness means that their network infrastructure must balance performance with security. When your attack surface area always expands as you scale, you need security alongside fast, flexible, and efficient systems.
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SASE is built specifically for these scenarios. Here are 6 situations where SASE provides an advantage over traditional single-point security. If you fall into any of them, you may want to consider implementing SASE as your primary security approach.
1. Enterprises with multiple locations
Organizations with branch offices, retail outlets, or regional offices scattered across different geographic locations can benefit from SASE. These can include larger companies in the top global industries, like financial services, manufacturing, real estate, oil and gas, and e-commerce. These companies constantly operate in new and different markets, hire new employees and contractors, and create relationships with multiple suppliers. SASE provides a unified approach to securing and optimizing network traffic across all locations, regardless of the underlying network infrastructure.
2. Organizations with remote workforces
By 2025, about 22% of Americans will be working remotely, taking advantage of the multiple benefits of working from home, whether job productivity or physical health. However, security becomes an even greater concern in a remote work environment, as many organizations have dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of employees, accessing resources from various locations, including home offices, institutions like libraries, cafes, and coworking spaces, and public areas like parks and airports. A SASE approach to cybersecurity ensures that these remote workers have secure and optimized access to applications and data without compromising the necessary security to keep their performance top-rate.
3. Cloud-first or cloud-centric organizations
Software as a Service (SaaS) is key to the modern global economy, showing no signs of slowing down. Revenue from SaaS companies is forecast to be $818.8B by 2029, at an annual growth rate of 19%. The demand for cloud services and applications (such as SaaS platforms) makes SASE even more critical, as it allows organizations to securely connect their users directly to cloud services while optimizing performance and ensuring consistent security policies across the board.
4. Organizations that must prioritize security
In some industries, it’s possible to do the bare minimum regarding cybersecurity. In others, security must be a top priority. These security-conscious organizations tend to deal with highly sensitive data (customer or patient data) or operate in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, and government. In many cases, they must comply with strict regulations and security standards, like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and others. They also require a strong GRC (governance, risk, compliance) strategy. The integrated approach of SASE provides robust protection against threats like malware, data breaches, and unauthorized access, regardless of where users or applications are located, making it ideal for organizations where security is a concern from the C-suite to end users.
5. Companies scaling quickly
Growing organizations that need a scalable and flexible network infrastructure often find SASE highly beneficial. It supports rapid deployment and scaling of network and security services across new locations or increased user bases without requiring extensive hardware investments or complex configurations. These days, many of the fastest-growing companies are artificial intelligence (such as AI startups), which need massive amounts of data to be instantly accessible anywhere in the world. This also makes them prime targets for bad cyber actors, who know the value of the data lurking in their networks and systems. SASE can help these companies ensure security right from the start.
6. Large businesses seeking operational efficiency
One of the challenges in achieving optimal security is that it requires extensive resource coordination among people, processes, and technology, which can lead to high costs and inefficiencies. SASE simplifies network management and reduces operational overhead by centralizing control and management through a cloud-based platform. This operational efficiency particularly appeals to organizations looking to streamline IT operations and reduce costs associated with maintaining multiple network and security appliances.
This last point is a great segue into our next section on the benefits of SASE.
What can SASE do for me?
Once you’ve determined that your organization would be a good fit for SASE, you want to ensure you get all the most out of it. Here are the top 5 benefits of SASE:
1. Enhanced Security
The bottom line with SASE is that when it is correctly implemented and managed, it is incredibly effective at efficiently delivering a high-security standard because it integrates multiple security functions (firewall, secure web gateway, intrusion prevention, data loss prevention, and more) into a unified platform. This ensures consistent security policies and enforcement across all network edges, whether users access applications from branch offices, remote locations, or mobile devices. By consolidating security measures into a single solution, SASE reduces complexity, improves network traffic visibility, and strengthens defense against ongoing cyber threats.
2. Improved Performance and User Experience
SASE prioritizes critical applications, such as voice and video conferencing, ensuring they receive adequate bandwidth and minimal latency for a smoother user experience. Let’s look closer at video conferencing to see what SASE can do. With hundreds of millions of video conferencing tools downloaded by workers around the world (and the video conferencing market expected to exceed $22B by 2032), SASE will become a greater priority for its ability to optimize network performance by dynamically routing traffic based on real-time conditions and application requirements. By leveraging direct internet access (DIA) and cloud connectivity, SASE reduces reliance on traditional multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) connections, improving performance and agility. Wait what?! LOL… let’s look at an analogy.
Imagine you're on a busy highway. SASE is like a smart traffic controller. It sees how crowded the lanes are (real-time conditions) and what kind of vehicles are using them (application requirements).
For important traffic, like emergency vehicles (critical applications), SASE directs them to clear lanes (high bandwidth) so they get there fast (low latency).
For regular traffic (non-critical applications), it might use different lanes depending on how crowded they are.
This keeps everything moving smoothly (optimizes network performance) without causing bottlenecks.
3. Simplified Network Management
Want to manage network security more efficiently? SASE centralizes network and security management through a cloud-native platform. This simplification eliminates the need to manage multiple-point solutions and, thus, reduces the complexity of configuring and maintaining network infrastructure across distributed locations. This can save you time and money. IT teams can implement policies uniformly, monitor network activity comprehensively, and troubleshoot issues more efficiently. Who would have thought something that sounds so funny, like SASE, could save you money!?
4. Scalability and Flexibility
Adapting to changing circumstances is critical in a modern approach to security. SASE is inherently scalable, making it suitable for organizations of varying sizes and evolving network demands. It supports rapid deployment of network and security services across new locations or increased user bases without the need for extensive hardware investments. The flexibility of cloud-delivered services allows organizations to adapt quickly to changing business requirements and scale their infrastructure accordingly.
5. Cost Efficiency
By consolidating network and security functions into a single cloud-delivered service, SASE reduces capital expenditures for purchasing and maintaining hardware appliances. It also lowers operational costs by streamlining IT management processes, optimizing bandwidth utilization, and replacing expensive MPLS links with cost-effective internet connections. Additionally, improved performance and user productivity contribute to overall cost savings and better return on investment (ROI).
Conclusion
SASE is a new approach to cybersecurity for the new global economy, where everything operates in the cloud so that organizations can have maximum flexibility and efficiency in their systems. SASE helps ensure that as the speed and volume of data transfers and network activity increases, the highest levels of security remain a priority.
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