Mastering SASE – Building a Secure and Agile Network Environment
SASE providers combine network and security systems into a single service, eliminating the need for multiple best-in-breed tools. This unified system streamlines management and reduces costs. SASE offers centralized role-based access control, zero trust policies, WAN optimization, digital experience monitoring, and more. It can also mitigate DDoS attacks and stop malware before it reaches enterprise networks.
Authentication
What is SASE? Secure access service edge (SASE) is a cloud-native architecture that unifies SD-WAN with security functions like SWG, CASB, FWaaS, and ZTNA into one service. This consolidation reduces complexity, makes managing a more flexible security framework more accessible, and delivers cost savings by shifting upfront capital expenses to monthly subscription fees. When selecting a SASE provider, it is essential to ensure that your solution provides the right level of integration for your needs. This should include setting policies centrally through a management platform and then applying them at distributed points of presence (PoPs) close to end users. This way, policies are applied based on real-time contexts, such as identity, location, device/application risk/trust posture, and data sensitivity. This enables Zero Trust network access by validating users and their devices — inside or outside the corporate firewall.
Access Control
Security is a critical component of SASE infrastructure. It adapts the Zero Trust approach to cybersecurity, recognizing that no connection should be given trust based on network location. Instead, it must be evaluated based on the user, device, and application. This requires much tighter access controls than traditional networking strategies can provide. SASE solutions combine network services like SD-WAN with security services such as firewall-as-a-service into a single unified platform to address this need. This enables companies to deploy holistic behavior analytics across all network areas, identifying threats and anomalies that siloed systems could miss. This unified framework also makes it easier for IT teams to manage SASE-based technologies using a single management console. This reduces the complexity of multiple cybersecurity systems and helps minimize costs by enabling businesses to pay only for what they use. SASE also supports better performance for remote users by delivering more efficient and direct access to applications and services. This is because traffic reaches SaaS providers close to end users, eliminating the need to route it back to data centers. As a result, SASE infrastructure can deliver low latency and improve network agility. This can also help businesses save money by avoiding costly backhauling. It can also simplify infrastructure by reducing the number of systems IT must manage and update.
Traffic Routing
SASE architecture extends security controls to the edge of your network, providing a more secure and agile connection for remote users. This is accomplished by combining security and networking technologies into one cloud-based service. This approach helps IT teams reduce the number of products they need to manage and maintain, allowing them to focus more on improving performance and security. Traffic routing is critical to SASE integration because it ensures users can access applications and services with minimal latency. This is achieved by ensuring that each device, user, and application is connected to the network securely and efficiently. Insufficient performance can impact productivity and user satisfaction, leading to costly downtime for your business. Monitoring helps identify and address network issues quickly, ensuring users get the expected experience. Defining clear integration objectives is critical to success. Whether your objectives are to streamline remote access, improve connectivity to cloud infrastructure and applications, or fortify data protection, creating a migration plan will help you achieve your goals. A well-designed migration plan will minimize employee disruptions and provide a seamless transition to SASE. Security is paramount for SASE environments, and the best way to protect your network is by integrating Zero Trust into your architecture with UEBA monitoring. UEBA systems are like behavioral psychologists for your network, constantly analyzing the behavior of each user and entity to detect anything unusual or suspicious.
Security
Traditional security and network models are not designed for a hybrid work environment, leaving organizations with disjointed stacks of technologies that can’t be easily updated to meet emerging threats. SASE addresses these challenges by combining networking and security into one scalable model. The unified SASE service architecture consolidates networking and security capabilities into one centralized solution, simplifying administration and cutting costs. IT can centrally manage a SASE solution with a single management console, and traffic flows through points of presence (PoPs) and edge servers closer to the user, providing better performance and cutting latency. These PoPs and edge servers inspect every request for access to an application or resource, using several contexts to validate security. These include the user’s identity, location, and device, whether the connection is encrypted, the type of content being accessed, and more. This is what makes a SASE network a zero-trust network. The benefits of this approach are significant: less complexity and cost, improved performance, faster time to market, and a more streamlined security framework suited to the challenges of modern threat protection. By moving away from perimeter-based networks and security to one based on an architecture of software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) with multiple security capabilities, SASE provides the foundation for a more agile enterprise.
