Once upon a time, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), which provides network connectivity and security through a single, cloud-based platform, was a technology only within reach of large businesses. SASE solutions were expensive and often relied on legacy enterprise authentication or identity systems (like Active Directory) that smaller or newer organizations didn’t always operate.
That has changed. Today, the SASE market is more dynamic than ever, making it easier than ever to find a solution tailored to a given business’s needs. At the same time, SASE solutions have become more flexible than ever. No matter what your network architecture or software stack looks like, there is a way to deploy SASE.
In this sense, SASE has been democratized, which is great news in a world where every year sets new records for the frequency and scale of cybersecurity attacks, making it paramount for organizations to secure distributed applications and users.
The growing challenge of SASE adoption
But there’s also some bad news: Along with SASE’s growing power and flexibility come significant deployment and management challenges. SASE vendors often don’t solve them; they simply provide network connectivity and security solutions, leaving it up to their customers to figure out how to deploy their software effectively.
As a result, the barrier standing in the way of successful SASE adoption for many businesses has become a lack of expertise. Like other paradigm-shifting technologies (such as virtualization or the cloud), SASE is only effective and practical to implement if businesses have access to the deep expertise necessary to make SASE solutions work as required.
Why SASE management is challenging
To make the point, let’s drill into the specifics of why modern SASE platforms are often so challenging to deploy and operate effectively. Key pain points include:
- Integration requirements: To connect and secure applications using a SASE solution, businesses must integrate SASE with their applications. This can be challenging for organizations that use dozens or hundreds of applications sourced from a multitude of vendors.
- Policy implementation: Securing applications with SASE requires policies that define who can connect and how. Crafting zero-trust policies that grant appropriate levels of access without unnecessary privileges requires deep familiarity with application access and authentication architectures.
- User management: Defining which users should have access to resources can be challenging, especially when user identities are managed across multiple systems or when user roles change frequently. To manage users securely and at scale, it’s critical to automate processes such as adding or removing users, but creating those automations is no mean feat.
- SASE monitoring: Setting up an effective SASE deployment is only part of the battle. Businesses must also continuously monitor SASE solutions to detect risks, such as anomalous access events.
These are challenges that are often difficult to solve, even for organizations with seasoned IT and networking staff. Because SASE is a fundamentally new approach to network connectivity and security, engineers accustomed to working with more traditional technologies, like VPNs and physical routers, may face a steep learning curve when tasked with setting up and maintaining a SASE solution.
The pitfalls of ineffective SASE management
Given that SASE solutions have effectively become the glue binding endpoints in modern, distributed enterprises, the consequences of failing to implement and manage SASE effectively can be severe.
They include, for starters, the risk that applications or other resources won’t be accessible to those who need them. For example, imagine how business productivity suffers if a member of the sales team can’t connect to a business’s CRM because a SASE policy is misconfigured.
Even worse are the security risks that can arise from SASE deployment and management oversights. Policy gaps or oversights may allow users to access sensitive data or applications they should not be able to access.
In addition, a lack of effective monitoring may cause an organization to overlook malicious endpoints on a network, a risk that is heightened because traditional approaches to network security monitoring typically don’t work well in contexts without a fixed network perimeter. SASE monitoring has become critical for detecting risks in modern IT estates where endpoints can be anywhere.
An effective approach to SASE adoption
It’s possible to get ahead of these risks, but doing so requires more than choosing a SASE solution and calling it a day.
Businesses must instead prioritize upfront investment in the expertise needed to set up and manage SASE effectively, either by hiring in-house SASE experts or by working with SASE service providers with deep experience in deploying, configuring, integrating, and administering SASE solutions.
The bottom line: Don’t let the growing flexibility of SASE solutions obscure their complexity. While SASE vendors have, to their credit, made their technology more environment-agnostic and customizable than ever, that doesn’t mean every IT department is ready to deploy and manage SASE effectively tomorrow. The expertise gap is real, and addressing it must be part of every SASE adoption strategy.
