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Gartner recently published the 2021 Strategic Roadmap for SASE Convergence, outlining key challenges that are driving shifts to Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) architecture. Not surprisingly, chief among these challenges are consistency, simplicity, transparency, and efficacy—all of which a properly implemented SASE architecture is positioned to solve.
But knowing what the challenges are, how do we then get to SASE? Has your journey already started? What are the right moves?
Businesses are now planning their future, following one of the most disruptive macroeconomic and global health crises in recent history. These future plans rely on IT leaders to help address four transformations that are underway—with applications, data, networks, and security—to deliver strong economic outcomes, better access, and lower risk.
As with most decisions or journeys, the big decisions are foundational ones: they determine the outcomes. As organizations shift to the cloud, think of the challenge like moving from a one-lane country road—limited to a single-function checkpoint—to a full, high-speed, multi-lane highway in which all lanes are accelerating with no controls in place. That’s what’s happening with app and data access in the cloud, too; users are accessing web, cloud, and private resources, from anywhere they can attempt access and from whichever device is handy, without expected performance or appropriate protection. These factors are why organizations must consider how to put better controls and a performant user experience in place, and apply the principles of the SASE architecture to their plans.
So how is SASE achieved? As Gartner outlines in the roadmap document, at least two things are clear, especially in the near term:
- Zero Trust, when applied to SASE architecture, starts with visibility—of all users, their identities, and all their traffic, including, web, SaaS applications, Shadow IT, public cloud services, custom applications in the public cloud, and data centers.
- Business context, applied to this traffic, relies on knowledge or awareness of the user, device, app, app instance, app risk rating, category, content, and actions to enforce conditional and contextual access rules and policies.
At Netskope, we view data context as a critical first step in selecting the right techno