Summary - Roundtable on SASE

Telecom Council's next lunch Roundtable meeting includes an unpanel and startup pitches focuses on the next big thing in enterprise networking - SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) because securing a network of "anything, anywhere, anytime" requires massive change and opens the door for a lot of innovation.

As companies large and small undergo digital transformation, they have expanded the flexibility of their IT assets. Enterprises have enabled SaaS, real-time apps, Work From Anywhere (WFA), many access devices & endpoints, Edge Computing, Cloud data, and SD-WAN. With these modern networking solutions, no longer hosted simply in the corporate datacenter, the ability to secure this “anything from anywhere” network has become a cat and mouse challenge, overlaid on SD-WAN. The next step in the evolution is to just abandon the “secured firewall around a central dataserver” mentality, and build security into the SD-WAN fabric, and that’s SASE.

Gartner coined the term Secure Access Service Edge in 2019, even before the big surge in WFA increased the corporate endpoints. With SASE, the notion of a firewall around your datacenter is obliterated for a new approach. Think of a castle with a moat, and a big door with a keypad. Historically, to access the secure area, a user would authenticate at the doorway, and once inside was considered a “friendly”. But with modern networking, data, apps, and services could be located anywhere in the cloud (the Service Edge), and could be accessed by users anywhere, on many kinds of devices. So, instead of a single doorway to access the kingdom, now every user on every device is faced with Zero Trust Network Access.

They can login, and their trust level will be determined by all factors (where they are, who they are, device) every time for every different service they try to access. IT teams can set a policy that is Identity-driven. Instead of that single doorway to the castle followed by freedom to roam once inside, access under SASE is now much more granular, much less Trusted, and much more frequently verified. It’s also the only way to secure the castle’s treasure, now that it’s spread across the world.

The result of a SASE approach is a more secure network. But, wait, there’s more!

Increased security through Zero Trust, Identity Driven policy with multiple checks
Lowered costs and complexity by reducing vendors as most older configurations required a networking vendor and a separate security solution.
The lower costs also means lower costs per endpoint, so in an increasingly WFA and cloudified world, it becomes cheaper-per-seat to connect people or new services to the SASE
Reduction in interop risks, delays, gaps because of reduced vendor count
Increased agility. Because of a decreased reliance on physical security firewalls and barriers, and a shift to policy-based, people and things can be moved or added much more quickly.

SASE is an evolution of SD-WAN, or you could also consider it a merger of SD-WAN and Security. Either way, it allows enterprises to build a more secure, more widely distributed network, and to manage that network with policy instead of hardware, and to oversee it more clearly through a “single pane of glass” tool. Telcos can work with SASE in their own networks, can sell SASE-optimized underlying network service, or can offer the value-added product of a full SASE solution to enterprise customers.

Join us at our upcoming meeting on SASE to discuss the opportunities, and to meet with some leading vendors and innovators.