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If you work in networking or security, you have probably gotten used to the acronym stew that makes up the technology industry at times. By now you have surely heard the latest buzzword and what industry analysts have coined as security service edge (SSE). SSE is essentially the consolidation of Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker, and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) delivered as a cloud service.
In the near-distant past, customers primarily relied on these solutions as distinct functions implemented in appliance form factors, usually deployed on their premises, including the headquarters and (more often than not) the branch sites as well. For customers, this approach was costly to maintain, required multiple vendor relationships, required specialized skills and dedicated headcount, and was a burden for most organizations due to its high cost, lack of efficiency, and rigid design that prevented business agility.
With the global pandemic and the rise of remote work, paired with businesses shifting their data and applications to the cloud, the adoption of cloud-delivered services has exploded. Recent supply chain issues have only added fuel to this fire, and further accelerated the adoption of cloud-based approaches across the technology industry. This is particularly notable in cybersecurity. However, SSE is a harbinger of great change for cloud security with the convergence of FWaaS, SWG, CASB, and ZTNA in a single, unified solution. SSE will power the converged security architectures of the future and aid customers in their security transformation by radically simplifying and unifying policies, reporting, and analytics, as well as unlocking entirely new use-cases to address, such as the emerging Internet of Things (IoT).
It’s important to highlight that there is in fact much more to SSE than consolidation of service functions wrapped together with a cloud-delivered, consumption-based business model. The winners and losers in SSE will be defined by those vendors that can truly secure the users, applications, and business’ valuable data and digital assets at all times. Similarly, the underlying infrastructure (or cloud) that the SSE vendors are built on will be critically important to networking professionals that care about service-level agreements (SLAs), latency, network integration, operational fit, and peering. While the acronym might be new, the breadth and depth of Netskope capabilities focused on SSE is not. In fact, Netskope was a first-mover in the SSE industry and was recently recognized as a “Leader” in the 2022 Gartner ® Magic Quadrant ™ for Security Service Edge (SSE).
Revisiting the acronym stew of the technology industry, how does SSE fit with secure access service edge (SASE) which the whole industry has been raving about for the last few years? As detailed in the recently released book from Netskope “Security Service Edge (SSE) for Dummies,” “SASE is the framework for implementing a cloud-based, converged infrastructure for networking and security functions. SASE combines concepts such as Zero Trust, SD-WAN, and Security Service Edge (SSE) to guide us to a se