The Benefits of a SASE Approach for Agencies
All of these components must work together in order for a SASE framework to become reality. Once again, unified, cloud-native services are particularly important with workers logging on from all across the globe. There are countless benefits to embracing SASE.
For one, networking teams can improve performance and consolidate the number of devices they must deploy. At the same time, security teams are regaining visibility and control of data at the user level.
By following a SASE framework, agencies can provide consistent firewalls, intrusion prevention, web security and cloud app access control everywhere, managed from a single console in the cloud. Operations speed up and friction is removed, preventing a slowdown by traditional security services and architectures.
Even before the pandemic, vendors were eager to take advantage of the new, growing SASE market. According to Gartner, 20 percent of enterprises will have adopted these capabilities from a single vendor by 2023, compared with just 5 percent in 2019. I think we’ll find these numbers to be low in retrospect, as the coronavirus pandemic forces and accelerates a massive move to the cloud.
But not all SASE architectures are equally well integrated. Some vendors cut down their time to market through acquisitions or partnerships — a shortcut to convergence. Vendors who link a wide swath of disparate services may not manage them as well, and their platforms may have higher latency. However, this market is evolving very quickly. Since so many agencies are working to totally rethink their approach to cybersecurity in the wake of the pandemic, it may be better to begin with short-term contracts to test utilization, ease of use and effectiveness. Since these products are offered as a service, subscription licensing may be available across offerings, which allows for greater flexibility.
Why SASE Makes Sense Amid the Pandemic
When Gartner proposed the SASE architecture last year, there was no way to guess that a pandemic was just around the bend. What passes for normalcy in the wake of the coronavirus is vastly different from what passed for normalcy just a year or two ago.
Yet, despite how much has changed, the SASE framework was, in a sense, ahead of its time. The pandemic simply accelerated the need to combine networking and security into a single architecture, so users can go directly to the cloud without putting sensitive data or applications at risk.
SASE represents a fantastic starting point for federal agencies who are currently rethinking their infrastructure and security. The key is being judicious about which vendors they choose and fully understanding desired outcomes and how seamlessly different components of their SASE architecture work together.