Digital business transformation demands scalability, reduced complexity, and improved security. SASE addresses these challenges through a network-delivered model that provides centralized policy control with zero-trust networking. So what is SASE? A self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) is an envelope where you put a stamp and write your own name and address. This way, you can send it to a person or organization, and they can reply in the same envelope. SASE stands for “self-addressed stamped envelope.”
Integrated SASE services eliminate multiple vendors, hardware appliances, and management silos. This helps to lower costs and mitigate risk in the event of any single vendor failure.
Scalability
As digital organizations continue to scale and evolve, their networking and security needs must grow and adapt accordingly. SASE provides scalability, flexibility, and elasticity that other solutions cannot. It enables centralized policy management of multiple security capabilities, including zero trust network access (ZTNA), cloud web security (CWS), DNS security, threat prevention, and next-generation firewall policies. By delivering these functions as a single platform, enterprises can streamline their network architecture and deliver consistent application performance and intrinsic security wherever users, devices, and applications reside.
A SASE solution is a secure tunnel into the corporate network, bypassing traditional network connectivity through a firewall or web gateway on-premises. Instead, traffic is routed to the SASE provider’s Point of Presence (POP) nearest to users to provide a better user experience and reduce latency and speed. This architecture also allows for a more flexible approach to security, as it can be configured based on the user’s or device’s identity rather than a specific IP address or location.
By providing a secure connection, a SASE solution eliminates the need for employees to use separate portals or download multiple client agents to connect to business applications. This saves IT resources and increases end-user productivity by reducing the steps involved in connecting to the system. The scalability and elasticity of SASE also enable enterprises to easily upgrade their solution without investing in new hardware.
Convenience
A well-designed SASE solution is designed for simplicity, allowing network and security teams to work together more efficiently. It doesn’t impose on them multiple management consoles, complex policies, or time-wasting tools for conducting investigations.
A key advantage is the ability to inspect encrypted traffic at a cloud scale, enabling granular security and compliance inspections of cloud applications and business processes. This eliminates the need for backhauling and improves user experience with higher performance, reduced latency, and consistent availability.
Another benefit is the elimination of a perimeter, focusing security close to users instead. This makes SASE the better choice to protect distributed workforces and cloud applications accessed from any location with an Internet connection.
SASE architectures also typically include a secure gateway (SGW) to prevent access to malicious sites, including phishing and botnet command-and-control servers. They can also mitigate DDoS attacks. This can help businesses meet compliance requirements, protect against privacy breaches and keep employees safe in the face of the pandemic. A tightly integrated SASE solution with SD-WAN and SWG simplifies management and delivers a more cohesive and consistent security framework across networks. It can also reduce costs by consolidating multiple-point products into a single service and delivering operational efficiency through automation and threat intelligence. The best SASE solutions are built on a single platform, combining branch FWaaS, SWG, ZTNA, CASB, and DLP into a comprehensive networking and security service offering that can be deployed in the cloud.
Flexibility
Unlike traditional network security, which relies on perimeters and a complex array of networking hardware and software, SASE delivers consistent policies, at consistent performance, for users connecting from anywhere, regardless of the devices they use or the locations they are working in. With remote work and distributed teams growing, businesses require solutions to securely connect to centralized data and applications while preventing threats from moving laterally across the network. SASE provides security without reliance on specific devices or data locations, which allows organizations to meet the demands of an increasingly distributed workforce and more stringent cybersecurity policies. It also delivers consistent performance, enabling businesses to scale without increasing the number of network and security administrators.
The key to success with SASE is a thorough evaluation of existing network architectures, security gaps, and pain points that need improvement, including remote access and management complexity. Identifying and addressing these issues before implementing SASE is important to avoid security gaps or unexpected costs.
In addition to providing a flexible, cloud-native architecture that reduces cost and complexity by consolidating networking and security functions into a single service, SASE supports Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) technology that shifts access control to the identity of users, applications, devices, and networks – rather than on traffic-flow, IP addresses or physical location. This helps protect assets from various threats, including DDoS attacks and ransomware.
Traditional VPN access requires VPN aggregation at hub locations and the network firewalls of remote offices to authenticate and apply security policies once, then grants wide/full access inside the corporate network. This legacy approach slowed performance, increased latency, and opened the network to more threats. On the other hand, SASE authenticates and applies security policies per transaction, granting least-privilege access to ensure the integrity of network resources.