A new buzzword invading the marketing materials of cybersecurity vendors is Standing for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). The term, coined by Gartner, refers to a technology trend in support of cloud-based applications and remote working, in which networking and security functionality converge in a single offering.
Omdia has its reservations about SASE as a product category, but we recognize that numerous vendors have adopted this parlance to describe all or part of their network security offerings.
The idea of SASE is attractive: that a single vendor, operating from the cloud, can offer an enterprise all its requirements for branch and remote employee networking, plus all the functionality to deliver that connectivity securely. On the networking side, this mainly covers functionality delivered by most software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) platforms, including:
Dynamic WAN link management
Multipath application steering and failover
Quality of service
Network-layer visibility and path monitoring
Meanwhile, in terms of security, a range of capabilities should be present, namely:
Application-aware firewall (NGFW-like functionality)
Secure web gateway (web traffic proxying)
Cloud access security broker (CASB, delivering policy-based SaaS access management)
Access control (VPN or zero-trust access)
An argument can be made for other subgroups here, such as data loss prevention (DLP), which many CASBs now include as a matter of course, as well as capabilities such as mobile device management (MDM) and decryption and inspection of encrypted traffic.
As such, it becomes clear that SASE is essentially a repackaging exercise, bundling a collection of capabilities together and offering them as a cloud-delivered service, almost certainly as a shopping list from which the customer can ..
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