How Sassy (SASE) Is Your Network?

Four Steps Toward Securing Your Digital Transformation

The term SASE, pronounced ‘sassy,’ is kind of cute, isn’t it? But secure access service edge (SASE) is a serious focus for organizations seeking to protect their data in the cloud, across the Internet, and within private networks.

In its Research Note, “The Future of Network Security Is in the Cloud,” global IT research and advisory firm Gartner defined SASE as “a converged cloud-delivered secure access service edge.”

Why is this security edge so important in defending data?

Best practice security is multi-layered, and establishes security intricacies along the way, seamless and nonintrusive to the digital user experience, but which effectively make it difficult for malicious parties including bots to breach the network.

Whether you believe in the cute SASE term or not, the edge (aka your network endpoint connections) is integral in perimeter security and for protecting against threats, the spread of malware, loss of control, and massive contamination and business damage. The edge is almost always the initial point of digital infection; a vector for infiltration.

In what Gartner characterized as its early stages of adoption, SASE is being driven by digital transformation, the adoption of cloud-based services, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and mobile and distributed workforces. We have to connect to do our jobs, but along the way, we might ingest malware, which can lay dormant, waiting to spread. Spoofing the identity, looking for that next jump… We all know those unfortunate individuals on Facebook, whose identities have been used to spread contagious links.

Understanding the risk that comes with digital business growth, you definitely want to filter all this traffic coming into your network, so you might run it back through your on-premises security appliances and over network resources. This eats up a lot of network bandwidth and costs more than use of the public internet, IaaS, and the cloud.

SASE enables organizations to overcome this difficult security-versus-Internet-access tradeoff; this business transformation hurdle.

SASE Business Drivers

Why get SASE in your security approach?

When the data center is the center of your network universe, it can inhibit transformational business architectures. A social, non-engineering side of your “network” wants to grow: A workforce cost-effectively using the Internet to amplify business potential, and partners and customers plugging into your network, making transactions. But amid all these new connection points, is it really your network anymore? It’s understandable to have sudden network blind spots as connections outside your visibility test you for access versus maintaining digital security.

Gartner reports, “More users, devices, applications, services and data are located outside of an enterprise than inside.”

How do you encrypt and inspect all this traffic and filter all those packets and links before you allow them into the business’s bloodstream?

Rather than hairpin traffic back through your datacenter, smart and more cost-efficient network service can be achieved through software-defined networking (SDN) and SD-WAN deployments that are secured through the infusion of security-as-a-service from the cloud.

Why Evaluate OPAQ SASE?

Digital business transformation requires anywhere, all-the-time access to business IT services, many now located in the cloud.

OPAQ enables organizations to:

  1. Shift inspections out to the session layer vs. routing the sessions to software engines that have to centrally inspect and then reroute communications. Network traffic and sensitive data storage is shifting to cloud platforms vs. enterprise data centers. Why haul it all in for costly inspection when the OPAQ SASE cloud provides a safe, cost-effective barrier?
  2. Get over the business transformational hurdle of risk aversion. Use SD-WAN and MPLS backhaul offload projects as catalysts to modernize and optimize security through enterprising software-defined perimeters. Cloud-based SASE offerings heavily reduce the need to update security at the physical or software level. Network and IT staff won’t have to spend all their time setting up equipment and performing maintenance and instead can focus on business transformation, business tools, privacy requirements, as well as advanced, next-generation security schemas.
  3. Reduce network security complexity by moving to one or two third-party providers for the key components of SASE: i.e., secure web gateways, DNS, zero trust network access (ZTNA), and workstation segmentation. This favorable software portfolio reduction can reduce agent bloat and performance issues at the end-user level. OPAQ also provides the requisite peering partnerships critical for points of presence, reducing latency for performance-sensitive apps such as video, web conferencing and VoIP.
  4. Easily bolster network segmentation to avoid kill-shots as you connect with new data sources as part of digital business transformation. OPAQ protects your organization with separate secure tunnels for: A) private enterprise data access (through MFA and monitoring for sensitive data and malware) and B) always-on protection for remote employees surfing the web for business connections and while on public WiFi.

OPAQ delivers the core SASE components to protect your digital business transformation investment:

  • Secure Web Gateways
  • Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS)
  • Leading advanced endpoint protection and segmentation
  • ZTNA (Zero Trust network architecture)
  • CASB capabilities

Enterprise data centers, which traditionally scrubbed the network from contagion, aren’t suddenly vanishing; they just aren’t the center of the universe anymore when it comes to granting secure access. To protect endpoint connections, SASE clouds can drift more flexibly and cost-effectively to secure the fluctuating perimeter

Get secure where the user requires access with OPAQ.

Download the Secure Network Modernization white paper

Download the Securing Remote Workers solution brief