Common SASE questions answered

Not sure what Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is or why you should care? Not to worry, in this three-minute read find all your common SASE questions answered.

What is SASE?

SASE is the convergence of wide-area networking (WAN), and network security services like CASB, FWaaS and Zero Trust, into a single, cloud-delivered service model. It delivers high quality, immediate access for remote users – increasingly the dominant user type- in a secure and scalable way. SASE is gaining traction. Gartner projects that 60% of enterprises will have explicit strategies and timelines for SASE by 2025. This is up from just 10% in 2020. SASE’s growth derives partly from its ability to simplify security for remote employees and branch offices.

More broadly, the concept has caught on because today with the cultural shift to remote working caused by a global pandemic over the last two years, everyone and every device is inherently remote. Even users inside the firewall are remote from cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) resources.

SASE

How does it help my organisation?

A successful SASE deployment should significantly enhance the performance and protection of enterprise applications, while simultaneously simplifying the work needed to manage them. An expert implementation partner, like MLR Networks will help you scope out your deployment and your return on investment in real, measurable terms. With SASE, you can retire some of your legacy technology in exchange for more robust, up-to-date, and reliable appliances. And that forms a significant portion of the cost-savings.

What tech does SASE replace?

You can make improvements to your architecture by moving to SASE as it makes some legacy tech redundant. Appliance-based solutions for SASE architecture capabilities are being made obsolete in favour of a cloud-hosted security service edge and software-defined network fabric. A few key examples of the technologies being made obsolete are secure web gateway (SWG) appliances, sandboxing appliances, virtual private networking (VPN) appliances, and branch office firewall appliances.

What core functions should SASE deliver?

All SASE deployments should offer:

  • Delivery over a multi-tenant converged and cloud-based stack
  • A low-latency, international SD-WAN service
  • Cloud-based security and policy delivery & enforcement
  • Shift away from IP address-based access to user-based models
  • Overcome any last-mile instability and latency issues
  • Offer robust management tools accessible from anywhere
  • Connect all cloud services and endpoints into the SASE

How can you calculate ROI?

An expert deployment partner will help you do this as part of the scoping and post-implementation analysis. But, if you’re in the early discussion stages, senior management likely wants some answers now. According to TechTarget, “To justify SASE investment, teams need to analyse the breakdown of cost factors in their current IT budgets and try to understand which items will become obsolete by transitioning to SASE. Below are six IT budget areas teams should analyse:

  1. Physical infrastructure
  2. Inbound connectivity
  3. Outbound connectivity
  4. Logging and monitoring
  5. Administration and manpower
  6. Data sources”

By looking for the efficiencies and cost reductions from these six key areas, IT teams can offer a more concrete business case for SASE adoption.

Get in touch with MLR Networks if you’d like to discuss SASE for your business.

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