SASE Use Cases and Associated Business Outcomes
Learn about some of the top use cases driving SASE adoption.
It didn’t take long for secure access service edge (SASE) to take the IT world by storm. One reason is that it was naturally time for an evolution of existing technologies — SD-WAN, for example. Another factor was the disruption IT departments experienced because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here are areas where SASE finds a home in an overall IT strategy.
Facility-as-a-hotspot
In today’s organizations, security is cloud-based, the workforce is distributed, the Internet is more reliable, and services and applications have moved to the cloud. Organizations are approaching WWT with the question, do you need an enterprise WAN? How can I reduce my WAN costs? Organizations have begun to deploy the SSE side of SASE, using only the Internet as the connectivity option replacing the enterprise WAN.
Hybrid workforce
It could be argued that SASE wouldn’t have become top of mind for IT leaders as fast as it did without the surge of employees working remotely in 2020. When offices closed, IT had no choice but to rethink its network and security architectures. VPN systems couldn’t keep up with the demand from remote workers.
Even though offices are reopening, Gartner predicts 48 percent of employees will continue to work remotely in some capacity after the pandemic. Organizations will still have to secure a significantly expanded attack surface.
A new approach was needed because the traditional remote work mechanism—VPN—is often prohibitively expensive on a scale. Secure Access Service Edge offers secure remote access to your company’s systems from any location in the world. SASE connects consumers to points of presence (PoPs) close to their location rather than routing them to a central data center. Instead of connecting one consumer with one network (as legacy VPN” s do), SASE creates a Secure Network Perimeter (Software-Defined Perimeter). You can imagine SDP as your private company network where all your consumers and services meet securely – an environment that hides you from the public Internet.
Companies are unlikely to return to their pre-pandemic business strategies, and the number of employees working from home will likely remain high. Investing in SASE is, therefore, a long-term consideration for most enterprises.