The opportunity described by Gartner analysts as secure access service edge, or SASE, is at this
point not so much a market as an aspirational description of where the now-separate networking
and security markets need to come together to better serve the needs of the digitally transformed
enterprise. The enterprise architectures of the past, based on separate networking and security
infrastructures, no longer fit the needs of most enterprises. They were designed to backhaul traffic
from remote branch offices and mobile VPN clients to a central location where network traffic is
monitored for performance issues, malicious activity, and malware before sending the traffic to its
destination, which was often in the same data center. However, the once-centralized applications
that end users seek to access no longer universally reside in those concentrated data centers as
enterprises more fully embrace cloud services of all kinds. Thanks to the global COVID-19 pandemic
and its resulting and rapid shift to work from home operations, digital transformation initiatives
have advanced at a much more rapid pace than the industry anticipated.
Having security teams manage a range of discrete security boxes and a growing array of endpoint
agents, as well as manage relationships/contracts with too many different security suppliers,
is becoming increasingly untenable. Perimeter security, where everything within the DMZ is
trusted once authenticated, is a relic of the past. Supporting these old paradigms while struggling
to understand what it takes to adequately secure applications, workloads, and data in SaaS, IaaS,
and PaaS service provider data centers is too complex and costly for all but the most mature and
well-funded security teams. At the same time, the performance bottlenecks introduced by applying
old network security architectures to new network traffic patterns cause a poor end-user experience.
Those bottlenecks also create an incentive for end users to work around or outside of existing
security controls, introducing new risks for their organizations.
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