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Security transformation is upon us, and the global pandemic further accelerated macro-trends such as work-from-anywhere that were already well underway. But with so many ideas now competing for airtime when it comes to describing that transformation and how to do it successfully, security professionals could be forgiven for thinking that the right moves and the good advice are getting buried under an avalanche of marketing, buzzwords, and acronyms.
Security Service Edge (SSE) is one of the newer ones. You likely already know about secure access service edge (SASE) as a framework for designing security and networking architecture to suit a business environment that increasingly relies on the cloud. SSE, which Gartner coined in 2021, encompasses a unified set of capabilities for the “security” side of SASE, including cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), data loss prevention (DLP), and remote browser isolation (RBI) among other security technologies that in the previous decade were delivered as separate services, but can now be delivered from a single platform.
But here we are getting into acronyms again, and you’re probably wondering to yourself, “How can SSE help me solve the issues my security team is facing right now?” Equally so, zero trust as a security paradigm is increasingly top of mind for both security executives and practitioners. So you might be wondering, should I implement one or the other or both? The answer is a resounding Yes.
Consider that the average security stack currently has 76 different controls currently in place. With a unified security solution consolidating what was once only available piecemeal, you have the opportunity to significantly simplify your security operations. As more organizations grapple with securing an increasingly remote, hybrid workforce amid an ever evolving threat landscape, granular visibility and continuous risk management become all the more important.
Simply put, SSE helps you simplify operations, better learn about your users, and apply zero trust principles to gain contextual knowledge of how your users interact with data—all of which will better protect you (and them) against risks, while also reducing your costs and providing more value to your business. But all solutions now marketed as SSE—or SASE, or zero trust—are not created equally.
Netskope Intelligent SSE
An “intelligent” solution, by definition, requires being able to acquire knowledge from that solution and use that knowledge to help it work better.
Netskope Intelligent SSE was designed from the onset to be a cloud-native and truly unified platform that quickly and safely connects users and devices to their destinations whether that was for web, SaaS, IaaS or private apps. We created this visualization of Netskope Intelligent SSE to help explain not only the individual components of a successful SSE solution, but also—crucially—how they work together in an intelligent way. Beyond specifically defined SSE components such as CASB, SWG, ZTNA, and FWaaS, Netskope can offer: