The Right Steps to SASE: Monitor, Assess, and Optimize

The following is an excerpt from Netskope’s recent book Designing a SASE Architecture for Dummies. This is the seventh, and final, in a series of seven posts detailing a set of incremental steps for implementing a well-functioning SASE architecture.

The road to SASE will take time, but it offers huge, transformative benefits to your security teams and your organization at every step along the way. Security certainly improves throughout the journey, but the impact reaches much farther than that. You’ll quickly begin to realize cost savings as legacy security appliances no longer need to be maintained, upgraded, and replaced. Since NG-SWG itself lives in the cloud, you don’t have to buy CAPEX-intensive security appliances with excessive, unused capacity.

But the way SASE works at your company will be different than SASE at mine, even though the principles behind SASE are the same. To keep SASE alive and healthy, you must monitor how well it is working, assess where improvements are needed, and take steps to optimize your implementation.

Taking the time to continuously improve will protect your gains. It’s difficult to overstate the benefits that NG-SWG brings to enterprise security. Where your security team had been overwhelmed, trying to make sense and correlate what a dozen or more complex and independent security applications were trying to tell them in the heat of the moment, they’ll now have a unified, automated platform working in real-time. All the security services will deliver a shared, coherent message resulting in fewer errors and making it possible to act decisively—and immediately. Every person on your team will be able to get more done to further enhance security and enable your business to run smoothly.

Most importantly, however, SASE with NG-SWG will transform business operations and the relationship between employees and technology, and your networking and security teams. Both furtive and brazen shadow IT can emerge into the light, enabling true digital transformation where best-in-class applications and tools can quickly and securely be adopted to fuel efficiency and drive opportunity. This is possible only when security can confidently support digital innovation and the widespread adoption of cloud services and align with networking and all parts of the business on digital transformation priorities. That’s what you get with true SASE.

If you’d like to read the complete Designing a SASE Architecture for Dummies book, you can download a complimentary copy here!