traditional organization structure is soon fading as customers move away from rigid, network-centric thinking to modern application-centric thinking. This phenomenon started more than a decade ago when enterprises started adopting virtualization and cloud IaaS. The ’cloud’ team, sometimes referred to as a cloud ‘center of excellence’ with cross representation from different organizations, made the decisions. We think this blurring of lines between the network and security will accelerate as customers want to adopt digital transformation and protect against security threats. Going forward, the discussion will shift from network-focused thinking to more of an emphasis on application delivery.

Labor shortage

Another phenomenon is the shortage of skilled labor, and many newer companies or ‘born-in-the cloud’ enterprises do not even have network or security teams on their staff. They outsource almost all infrastructure with cloud for compute, network, and storage as well as security. The problem is that larger, older enterprises suffer the same skills shortages, leading to higher costs, lack of efficiency, and potential for breach. One alarming statistic is that almost 45 percent of cybersecurity professionals are considering resigning due to stress and workloads, a trend that will result in many fewer individuals entering the field than are required.  A managed approach may help close this gap.

Audit and compliance

Most organizations still need to meet regulatory compliance standards and keep up other aspects for audits and change management. Requirements are becoming even more onerous over time as personal information protection and data residency become leading considerations.

Sustainability and cost considerations

Architecting sustainable solutions

It is tempting to adopt the newest technology or best-of-breed offering, only to find out later the implementation constraints that come with the need to stitch disparate solutions. As an example, one of our enterprise customers had all the global traffic routed to a single data center that did malware scrubbing. This turned out to be unsustainable as the business grew and became more distributed. As introduced earlier, a distributed data plane architecture offers the enterprise flexibility and scalability in where to implement the required functionality.

Alert fatigue and manageability of disparate solutions

Another customer shared how they needed a six-person team to process the alerts from many of the security devices and yet they were unable to effectively tie them together in a meaningful way. This leads back to the single pane of glass, and with a scale-out services PoP architecture, the different functions are more effectively ‘chained’ in a way that makes it easier to correlate alerts.

Cost savings

Lastly, it’s essential to consider the cost of operations, maintenance and personnel needed to manage the fragmented solutions. This again leads back to the promise of SASE as a managed service with proven lower total cost of ownership. Analogous to the cloud consumption model with demonstrated advantages, the network and security consumption model delivers the same business outcomes.

The future

The combination of these three SASE attributes will deliver enterprise agility via integrated provisioning, configuration, orchestration, and management of both networking and security. Instead of convoluted traffic paths with service chaining, the new approach is to have ‘single pass’ architecture to provide relevant network and security services where needed.