SASE is the new approach towards Network and Security Architecture for today’s Enterprises. Basically SASE is the acronym for Secure Access Service Edge. As the pandemic has changed how we work, almost every organization now has it’s employees working from the cozy corners of their homes, workforce is remote and much distributed now.
Employees connecting to their office networks using VPNs over home broadband connections are much prone to malicious attackers as compare to working from an office network in the office building. It’s not only about the security but the quality of service as well, because the traffic has to travel to DC to get authenticated each time a user logs-in which hinders the experience. With this increase in number of remote users, SaaS applications, cloud adoption, IOT and mobile devices, traditional network architectures needs to evolve and converge into more distributed and available networks with security at the very center of it. The security perimeter of the network has expanded and now is not confined only in the organization’s DC.
The SASE architecture is a mix of Software Defined WAN and security capabilities like Firewall As a Service(FWaaS), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) etc. With all these cloud based services, the Enterprise can implement Next Gen FW policies, Secure DNS, Web filtering, Intrusion prevention/detection systems, Sandboxing at several strategic edge locations.
On the other hand, ZTNA services provides least privilege access to defined applications, the trust level is 0 as the name suggests and it’s never taken for granted. The SASE model has been widely accepted by the industry and service provider organizations are now in process of building their SASE solutions for Enterprise customers. We’re in very exciting times where the traditional network and security architecture is on the verge of being converged into more distributed, dynamic, secure and highly available and automated architecture. Enjoy these times my fellow network engineers!!!!
