What Is SASE?
Secure access service edge, or SASE (pronounced “sassy”), is an emerging cybersecurity concept that Gartner described in the August 2019 report The Future of Network Security in the Cloud.
With an increase in remote users and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, data moving from the data center to cloud services, and more traffic going to public cloud services and branch offices than back to the data center, the need for a new approach for network security has risen.
SASE is the convergence of wide-area networking or WAN, and network security services like CASB, FWaaS, and Zero Trust, into a single, cloud-delivered service model. According to Gartner, “SASE capabilities are delivered as a service-based upon the identity of the entity, real-time context, enterprise security/compliance policies, and continuous assessment of risk/trust throughout the sessions. Identities of entities can be associated with people, groups of people (branch offices), devices, applications, services, IoT systems or edge computing locations.”
Gartner expects that by 2024, at least 40% of enterprises will have explicit strategies to adopt SASE, up from less than 1% at year-end 2018. A SASE architecture identifies users and devices, applies policy-based security, and delivers secure access to the appropriate application or data. This approach allows organizations to apply “secure access” no matter where their users, applications, or devices are located.
