SASE has never been more relevant. The accelerated and sustained transition to work from anywhere has made converged cloud networking and cloud security a necessity.
Gartner, who first coined the term SASE in 2019, has further defined what SASE looks like today and in the future and the secret ingredient is Cloud. Some key takeaways from their SASE roadmap include:
- To protect anywhere, anytime access to digital capabilities, security must become software-defined and cloud-delivered, forcing changes in security architecture and vendor selection.
- SASE security policy enforcement is dispersed in the cloud. This requires a software-based, hardware-neutral architecture deployed across multiple points of presence (POPs) with policy enforcement close to the point of consumption.
- SASE solutions are cloud-delivered, but vendors vary in the degree of “cloud nativeness” of their architecture. Legacy appliance and virtual appliance architectures need to be broken down into smaller, scalable components.
- Where physical SWG, CASB and VPN appliances are used, we advise enterprises move off these appliances at the soonest refresh possible and shift to cloud offerings. The legacy perimeter must transform into a set of cloud-based, converged capabilities created when and where an enterprise needs them — that is, a dynamically created, policy-based secure access service edge.
Gartner, 2021 Strategic Roadmap for SASE Convergence, Neil MacDonald, Nat Smith, Lawrence Orans, Joe Skorupa, 25 March 2021