Ongoing business transformation has put IT teams under enormous pressure to continually expand and retool networks to keep up. This is especially true for cybersecurity devices, which have traditionally been deployed to monitor and secure largely static network environments. But now, because of the rapid and continuous pace of digital innovation, those security tools are struggling to keep up. The quick transition to a remote workforce, which essentially inverted the network by placing most workers outside the traditional security border, is just the latest example.

Now more than ever, it is essential that security tools no longer be deployed as separate elements of the network. And they don't need to be linked to network components, but networking and security elements need to be woven together into a single solution.

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Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is an emerging enterprise strategy that incorporates multiple solutions to enable secure remote access to on-premises, cloud-based, and online resources. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of hype that has left some organizations wondering what exactly SASE is. Understanding the basic concepts and components of SASE is important, as the benefits can be significant for many organizations. Fortunately, getting to the bottom of this is easy, as many of the fundamentals of SASE – such as bringing networking and security together– are trends that customers have been gravitating to for years. However, it is still critical to properly define SASE up front in order to avoid adding complexity or, worse, missing the true value of SASE at all.

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Given today’s expanding networks, largely being driven by cloud transformation and similar digital transformation efforts, keeping everything connected in a single, easily manageable environment is a critical challenge. Extending things like cloud services to your mobile workers and branch offices will inevitably impact your network’s performance – especially if you are still trying to route traffic through your central network using things like WAN routers and MPLS connections in a hub and spoke design. Routing cloud-based applications through a WAN link to the central network can severely impact productivity and user experience while creating continually increasing bandwidth loads.

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