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I’m not big on acronyms or buzzwords. Like many executives, my eyes glaze over when I’m being prospected with an alphabet soup of technology terms I supposedly “need” to care about.
So why, then, does the title of this article include Security Service Edge (SSE), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), and Zero Trust? Despite our justified disdain for acronyms, the ideas behind these terms hold genuine importance for business leaders. In the rush (by technology vendors and analysts) to over-market these terms, we are confusing the message and obscuring their business value.
Simply put: if I’m a business leader, particularly a non-technical business leader, why on earth do I care what SSE, SASE, and Zero Trust mean?
I’ll tell you. As enterprises, we built our IT environments around two tenets: 1.) people working in offices, and 2.) applications and data living in data centers. Neither of those continues to be true, and the pandemic has been a catalyst for even faster evolution. Changing how we secure people working productively from anywhere is a journey security leaders have already started, and there’s much work still to be done.
But this journey is worth it. It will improve agility in how you go to market. It will secure your most important assets, people and data, everywhere they are. It will also mean breaking down organizational silos to help your people work m