Hello, and welcome back to this next TomCast from GuardSight; we are a tactical cybersecurity-as-a-service organization dedicated to helping businesses protect their data, their assets, and their endpoints.

Today we are going to discuss a solution that can benefit your entire organization’s workforce, maintain a consistent user experience all while ensuring that experience is secure, or as secure as you can make it with the technologies available. That solution is known as Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE for short. While it sounds like a general attitude that you may have encountered with some people in your life, this is a completely different type of SASE.

SASE is defined by Tech Target as a cloud architecture model that bundles together network and cloud-native security technologies and delivers them as a single cloud service. So what does that mean more in depth? SASE takes various technologies like Firewall-As-A-Service, Software Defined Wide Area Networks, Cloud Access Security Brokers, Secure Web Gateways, and Zero-Trust Network Architectures (and even more) and combines them into a single service offering or solution.

What makes this better than, say, a VPN solution you use to secure your communications to the main office, the central data center, or your organizations cloud instance? Well, there are a few benefits that a SASE solution can provide over the use of legacy communication methods or legacy security methods. Let’s say, for example, your organization has on-premises resources and a cloud instance where other resources reside. For a simpler term, your organization is in a hybrid state like many out there.

You are currently connecting into the central main office datacenter through VPN to connect to organizational resources. Your data path goes from your location (whether it be home office remote or a remote office location) to the office, then back out to cloud resources, effectively doing a hairpin maneuver to ensure that your traffic is maintaining that encapsulation that your organization believes is the secure way to communicate. Imagine if you just simply connected to your cloud resources without having to VPN in? Is this even possible to do while maintaining some semblance of security?

Absolutely. SASE is identity driven using identity markers to identify users and locations versus being site driven. It uses an SD-WAN private backbone to reduce latency so you’re not being impacted by common internet traffic. With the firewall as a service and cloud access security brokers integrated with the endpoint security solution on the endpoints, traffic up and down is protected and your endpoint is protected. SASE was designed to be much more user-centric to ensure you, the end user, could maintain a consistent experience and maximize productivity while reducing the headaches of excess connectivity clients, configurations, and such.

Not only do the SASE solutions protect your endpoints, but think of what the acronym stands for. Secure Access Service Edge. It protects those devices on the edge. Outside of your particular asset, think about IoT and other edge devices. SASE protects those as well as part of the overall solution. That takes a considerable amount of risk out of IoT use (since typical IoT devices do not typically come with security baked in).

SASE changes the thought process when discussing security solutions. It is no longer about the security posture of a particular site or region; it is about the security of the user. This is the kind of solution that enables organizations to change their approach to network security. SASE is also a solution that provides relative ease in scalability.

Now, SASE solutions are definitely not perfect, and they may not be for everyone. For those organizations that prefer a multi-vendor approach to their solutions, SASE will more than likely not be for you. SASE solutions are available from many different vendors, but you only use one for the entire solution. So, you can theoretically also have a single point of failure should your SASE solution vendor experience an outage or adverse event.

So, take that information back to your organizational leadership and start the conversations. SASE has several benefits as well as some drawbacks. If you are uncertain and want to learn more, reach out to the folks here at GuardSight. They are very knowledgeable about the various security solutions available and would be happy to help you. Then, maybe your organization will get a bit….SASE. Ok, that may have been unnecessary, but you get what I mean.

We here at GuardSight thank you for taking the time to listen to this TomCast. For more information on various cybersecurity tips head on over to our website and check out more TomCasts. Those are located over on www.guardsight.com/tomcast. Or, if you would like more information on what GuardSight can do for you, head on over to www.guardsight.com and contact us. There are several free cybersecurity tools out there that can help you improve your overall security posture. We’d love to hear from you! Thanks!