Retour 
Traditional security programs were predicated on protecting the typically internally hosted technology infrastructure and the data within that environment. This led to an ecosystem composed of numerous discrete tools and processes all intended to detect adversaries and prevent harm. It included a multitude of controls spanning network and infrastructure security, application security, access control, and process controls.
In a world now dominated by the cloud, where applications leverage public cloud providers or are subscribed to as SaaS apps, the challenges of security have dramatically changed. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) security architectures, with Next-Generation Secure Web Gateways (NG-SWG) at their cores, will transform security functions to fully address the cloud. They’ll also change how CISOs think about the role of security within businesses.
I’ve been a CISO for some of the most complex organizations in the world, and I see SASE as the logical evolutionary next step for our security programs. That’s a big part of why I joined Netskope, whose progress in the SASE framework is described by Gartner as being farther along than any other vendor. But we’ll need to approach it the right way to succeed. By shedding light on where the industry needs to get to, my hope is that the interim steps will become clearer.
Out with Old Perceptions
Security teams must jettison some old thinking and entrenched beliefs. Let’s start with the following:
Discard the data center mentality: As the percentage of company data stored in the cloud and SaaS apps has risen, the data center has become just one destination among many that people need to access. It’s time to realize that your world is defined by where your data lives. The data center is no longer a “center.”
Forget about perimeters: Data center-focused security was about protecting perimeters and regulating traffic. Cloud security is about understanding users and connections, applying appropriate levels of control, and monitoring and regulating traffic in real-time. You cannot retrofit data center security, with its rigid boundaries and technology stack, to accomplishing this task in the cloud.
Stop thinking of the “corporate network” as a well-defined place: The pandemic accelerated the distribution of the workforce. Digital transformation continues to swell the expanse of third-party suppliers and services with which a business interacts. The security landscape is vast and shifting. Work has to happen wherever an employee or a third party happens to be. Establishing the data center as a single control point to which you routed all network traffic worked fine when all data was within your environment. Now that data is everywhere, a security network and associated security services must follow it. This requires a new network architecture that reflects that dispersal.
Embrace SASE
SASE currently offers security teams the most complete architectural design for addressing this new world. It’s also been the subject of so much hype that things have become confused. So, from one CISO to another, here’s how it works.
SASE creates a security cloud: In SASE, network access points are distributed throughout the globe. Security services are also distributed and operate at those access points. This security cloud becomes the new control point for monitoring traffic and protecting everyone. Every user, whether they are an employee or a third party, is effectively a branch office of one.
SASE employs an integrated collection of real-time services: Instead of a loose conglomeration of separate hardware appliances and services with each element serving an independent role in network security, SASE is a single set of integrated services that work together to do the work of CASB, DLP, SWG, ATP, and other important functions. In fact, those narrow acronyms will fade away as the focus shifts to “big picture” descriptions of the work required: protecting data, users, and applications, and doing all of those using a unified platform, single-pass inspection, a single console, and a single policy engine.
SASE understands what users are doing in real-time: Data center-focused security grants access, but traffic flows are left effectively unmonitored as users work. The work of SASE does not stop at access. SASE makes it possible to understand, for example, if a user is sharing sensitive information inside different instances of the same SaaS applications such as Microsoft OneDrive or Google Docs. Furthermore, properly-implemented SASE can inspect and apply policy based on user actions—what the user is doing with the data. This can only be achieved by a system that understands the user, the application, and the data, creating context that can then be applied to policy implementation.
Here is a practical