SASE Security: Enhancing Your Security Posture

The digital age is upon us bringing with its major transformation and digitalization of resources and network application. Everything is shifting towards cloud working, in a way forgetting the traditional old network systems and perimeters.

However, these new cloud-based systems come with quite a few threats that leave the organisations overexposed to various cyber-attacks threatening confidential data leakage. As this digital transformation is reaching its peak Zero Trust security has taken the spotlight for most of the part. Zero Trust has been around for quite a while as a term and concept; however, firms are finally seeing sense in practically using it to help strengthen their cloud networks and systems.

Talking about the pandemic working situation. With the transition from secured remote networks configured at the workplace to overexposed work from the home working scenario, the organisations have struggled to provide their support employees with a Remote workforce security system. As per The Week magazine, Indian companies faced a lot of havoc in 2020 with a 37% increase in cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2020 in comparison to numbers of 2019.

What does Zero-Trust security offer?

Zero trusts authenticate systems or individuals to work on only those applications, resources and databases they are allowed to access. This reduces the cyber-attack surface of the individuals and organisations they are applied to. Most of the security decisions are run and managed in the cloud, however, the decisions are taken at an endpoint. It’s completely flexible and offers a lot of safety features to the networks of the organisation they are working with.

What is SASE?

SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge and is pronounced as ‘sassy’. This next-generation security network concept was first proposed by Gartner in its report ‘The Future of Network Security is in the Cloud’ in the year 2019. There the Gartner defines SASE as a solution that is cloud-based that is successful in offering “comprehensive WAN capabilities with comprehensive network security functions such as CASB, SWG, FWaaS, and ZTNA support the dynamic secure access needs of digital enterprises.”

To simplify SASE, it connects various entities like machines and users (individuals/organisations) to their desired systems and applications even if their locations are far spread.

In their report, Gartner also pointed out that traditional security models are very much focused on the data centre, and this needs to change. We need to identify these users and applications. The report from Gartner stated that in a modern cloud-centric digital business, the users, devices and applications require safe and secure access. This holds even more value and truth as the traffic flow and workforce pattern has changed as compared to when the traditional security systems were adopted. The reasons:

Majority of the work is carried out off network
A lot of traffic is focused on obtaining cloud-based services than the traditional data centres
Most of the work is taken care of by the cloud rather than the data-driven centres
A large chunk of sensitive data is secured over the cloud than on the enterprise’s network.

Using the SASE framework, Zero Trust SASE security is capable of providing a global cloud system. For instance, With Zero Trust, it presumes that all information and websites are unsafe. That combined with the SASE’s Remote browser isolation (RBI) the system monitors all the contents in a separate virtual space cloud and only allows the secured content to be transferred to the user’s device.

There are a lot of features that the Zero Trust security can align itself with the popular SASE to provide a seamless and secure experience to organisations.

Benefits of using SASE:

Amazing user experience with SASE:

Earlier, when the applications, systems and networks were managed and controlled by the IT team, in one place, predicting and controlling user experience was easy, today, however, the situation is different. With applications and networks spread wide and far using multiple clouds, the companies continue to rely on the old VPN model for security. And this is quite atrocious as the old VPN models expose a lot of surface attack area by exposing the IP addresses of the users to the hackers.

With SASE, it automatically manages multi-factor authentications at different online exchanges and secures connections to applications that use the cloud for low latency. It brings security right at your doorsteps.

2) SASE, the risk manager:

SASE’s framework has Zero trust network access as one of its key components. This allows remote users with secure access applications and diminishes attack surface and restricts any unauthorized movement on the network. Built with the cloud-based generation problems in mind SASE vows to protect your system and network against any data or online threat. It doesn’t matter how far spread the users are or how many networks and applications are being accessed, it is ready to inspect and monitor all of it for any anomalies.

3) SASE is highly economical:

Organisations to deal with various security threats adds in more and more complex security models each dealing with a different kind of threat. This results in increased costs and overheads. Even then these systems are highly inadequate to provide the proper assurance and security your organisation needs. SASE deals with them all single-handedly/ it flips the security model. Instead of securing and monitoring the secure perimeter, it focuses on identifying users and other such entities. SASE is successful in pushing access and security services towards the users.

Conclusion

Companies and organisations are in an eager search for efficient security systems that will provide their enterprise and data with optimum safety and security against threats. The Statista report also signifies that spending on cybersecurity by companies has increased significantly to $43.1 billion in 2020 as compared to $40.8 billion in 2019.

Not only security but companies and organizations also need a new strong security model that is simple, secure, fast and flexible. SASE with Zero Trust SASE promises to offer just that. This flexible and agile network is the future of all digital transformations.