How SASE and the Internet Took Over Wide Area Networks (Part 2)

This blog is part of the ongoing “I&O Perspectives” series, which features insights from industry experts about the impact of current threats, networking, and other cybersecurity trends.

In the first part of this blog series, we observed the inception of an internet-based model where corporate networks have no borders anymore, home is the office, applications are in the cloud.

This paradigm shift makes connectivity ubiquitous. But security risks have dramatically increased. For SASE to scale and protect all users, it requires a solid platform. At Netskope, we built NewEdge, a purpose-built platform to deliver highly-available and fast SSE and SD-WAN. Let’s take a look at the technologies and designs that made that possible:

Internet vs. MPLS-VPN

In front of the inflexible, but SLA-capable MPLS-VPN networks, lies the disdained contortionist giant, the internet.

Content and cloud providers have been very active to build an Internet on which they can rely. In fact, they require a high quality and open network to pour traffic into their customers’ screens. They invest in submarine cables and operate transport infrastructure that supersede some telcos and transit networks. They also massively sponsored interconnection initiatives like internet exchange facilities. Interconnections are essential, and they’ve been a delicate subject. On the one hand, ISPs invest massively into their access infrastructures. Conversely, content providers need clean access to these eyeballs (the consumers). In the middle, transit providers try to make money by connecting both ends. As a result, interests are sometimes conflicting.

There have been a few disputes where some felt they were not paid enough for the value they were bringing. In May 2024, for instance, Cogent removed some of their connectivity with Tata, since the two transit providers couldn’t find an agreement for a balanced interconnection strategy. This impacted networks which were strongly relying on these providers with no decent alternative paths.

On the technology side, optics, forwarding chips, and protocol improvements have enabled the internet to reach bandwidth heights on low budgets. The generalization of hardware-enabled telemetry has immensely helped with the optimization of high-bandwidth networks, such as internet backbones.

In 2012, in a previous venture, we developed an internet routing optimization software. Thanks to billions of performance measurements, we got firm confirmation that the internet required improvements for more availability and performance, mainly in some specific geographical areas or under particular network conditions. Like Netskope, most content providers and cloud providers have developed their own BGP traffic engineering framework to increase availability and performance.

Thanks to high bandwidths, peering collaborations, and intelligent routing, the long debates around quality of service, traffic engineering, and SLAs have faded.

Netskope has invested hundreds of millions in its platform, NewEdge, and the underlying connectivity framework. With full compute and all the security services available across 75+ regions and 100+ centers, NewEdge ensures zero performance trade-offs. Netskope users benefit from geographical proximity and enhanced last-mile connectivity through multiple transit paths and dense peering.

SDN – Software Defined Networks (or not)

With MPLS-VPN, the telco explicitly configures each customer context and controls all configurations in the backbone. In contrast, in a proper SDN framework, the customer has configuration control.

There have been attempts to provide customers with self-service UIs and APIs to operate their configurations and automate core networks configurations. Besides strict control, not interfering with other customers, and respecting constrained designs, it also means restricting configuration options and fancy deployments only telco engineers can manually perform. Finally, with private backbones, SDN remains constrained by the underlying infrastructure.

Building tunnels as overlays on the internet, e.g., IPsec SD-WANs, is a configuration task within customer’s control only, providing more autonomy and flexibility. As long as you have plenty of internet bandwidth, anything is doable. SD-WAN also benefits from innovation and efforts in orchestration models, ergonomy, and modern graphical interfaces, making the configuration experience light and easy.

Harnessing multi-tenancy

Together with the SDN concept comes the need for multi-tenancy. MPLS-VPN brought routing separation, a standardized and interoperable architecture that isolates multiple customers in contexts. Similarly, vendors and open source contributors implemented routing separation in firewalls and operating systems. Most SD-WAN devices have similar proprietary techniques and extend separated segments through IPsec tunnels.

In addition to separating routing, multi-tenancy delivers a complete service instance to multiple customers: management interfaces and APIs, the higher-layers applications, and security around that. It allows the abstraction of the hardware and operating systems for instantaneous provisioning, geographical independence, and elasticity. Implementing true multi-tenancy requires mastering computer architecture and orchestration to build an effective and secure system. In the last decade, hundreds of Netskope platform engineers have invested their energy into the specifics of these technologies for building the NewEdge framework.

The rise of cloud security services

While security services run on dedicated hardware at customers’ remote locations and their data centers, multi-tenancy allows them to run in the cloud. It comes with all the well-known advantages that well-designed cloud solutions bring:

• Continuous improvements
• Scalabilità
• Redundancy
• Performance – proximity
• Observability
• Tranquility (24/7 managed service)

SASE for the corporate users

Why is SASE overtaking perimeter security?

• First, SASE provides the services a customer IT department couldn’t build with dedicated best-of-breed equipment, software, and any complexity. Indeed, data loss prevention (DLP), threat, and malware protection require cloud models with both central API enablement and high-performance computing, which are barely scalable in a decentralized, firewall-based model.
• Second, they’re available anywhere with higher performance than if we were tromboning through a customer data center.

If we were to stop here, we could imagine a world where local networks have become a simple and plain commodity. They isolate and segment the devices from each other at all layers, and all their communications flow through the SASE platform. For (human) users, this is 100% right. 

However, the IT infrastructure also has other types of machines for which private and Internet connectivity is a must. How does this work, then?

Integrating IoT, legacy devices, and unmanaged networks with SASE

In SASE, users connect to the cloud security platform with a client integrated into their operating system. Within the corporation’s perimeter, some devices cannot onboard the same smart client. They also sometimes operate connectivity with each other within the geographical location or to the data center. In these cases, private connectivity is provided through IPsec meshes over the internet in an SD-WAN model, complemented by the SSE security framework with:

• Local servers
• Industrial,medical and any sensitive IoTs 
• Legacy use cases, printers for instance
• Unmanaged devices and Wi-Fi Guests 

Looking ahead

With the internet as a stable and high-performance transport network, the undisputed adoption of SaaS applications, and the maturity of multi-tenant security clouds, corporations can now connect users seamlessly and securely, marking a shift from traditional corporate networks. While some use cases still require perimeter control, and perimeter firewalls remain necessary for campus routing, SASE–including SD-WAN devices–offers the most flexible solution for corporate users as well as fixed and unmanaged devices.

The momentum behind SASE continues to grow, marking a pivotal shift in how IT departments connect and secure their networks. 

Stay tuned for my next blog post, where we will discuss internet architecture, availability, and performance.

Join us at SASE Week 2024 to explore the latest in SASE and Zero Trust, and learn how to enhance your organization’s security and network transformation strategy. Don’t miss the “SASE for Networkers Roundtable: Achieving Network Security Without Performance Trade-offs” on Sep 25,  where customers will share their digital transformation journeys toward SASE