Four Major SASE Challenges to Address

While Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) holds a lot of potential, enterprises trying to adopt and execute SASE technologies and processes in a hybrid cloud environment may face some challenges. These include ensuring organizations select the appropriate vendors and solutions to support their targeted results, creating the necessary organizational change to enable this paradigm transition, and aligning responsibilities effectively.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) fills this need as hybrid cloud systems ultimately necessitate a new approach to cybersecurity, including new technologies and processes. Many IT and security experts will argue that SASE merely consolidates already existing tools, technologies, and processes. This viewpoint has some validity, but in many respects, the consolidation and integration of various capabilities and approaches constitute an innovation in and of itself.

SASE updates network and security to prepare any global firm for the future. SASE claims to make cloud migration and remote work possible on a more concrete level. SASE, however, also has a number of drawbacks. Before embarking on their journey, firms should consider the following difficulties in order to reap the benefits of SASE.

Also Read: DDoS Protection: The Top Three Things to Look for

Some areas would require onsite routing and security systems

A solitary SASE may not always be sufficient to satisfy all of a company’s needs. For instance, branch-intensive requirements that call for locally hosted apps and data, or where local security is required to keep OT and IT distinct at a branch location. Enterprises must consider a hybrid build-up in that case to balance networking and security between on-premise and cloud environments.

Fostering faith in SASE

Many traditional professionals are still hesitant to adopt the SASE technique for hybrid cloud environments because of their ongoing concerns about trust. Companies are naturally expected to place a significant degree of trust in SASE providers when it comes to meeting their network and security demands because of the largely robust functionality and goals of SASE technology. Firms need to exercise due diligence to make sure they are dealing with credible partners, have a large market uptake, have service level agreements in place, and can serve as trusted partners.

Selecting products

If the IT teams are siloed and intend to remain so, deployment will require at least two products: one or more for networking and one or more for security.

For the sake of this illustration, certain networking suppliers would also include any SD-WAN providers in addition to the possible demand for an extra cloud service for CDN coverage, DDoS protection, and WAN optimization. Naturally, some SD-WAN suppliers today include many of those features. However, the SASE deployment can merge on-premises services into a single solution if the IT teams are segregated and intend to stay that way while agreeing to control a shared infrastructure.

Getting around the tool landscape

Just traversing the tooling landscape and related ecosystem is a difficult element of SASE.

Since SASE is essentially a collection of tools and processes, many firms find it difficult to traverse the vendor ecosystem it produces. This is influenced in part by the constant barrage of vendor marketing and the variety of tools and capabilities offered.

Also Read: Challenges of Service Access Security Edge (SASE) Adoption

A company must still consider its current tech stack even after choosing a certain set of tools to use. This entails a search for redundant capabilities that might become obsolete when the business transitions to the more contemporary cloud-driven SASE tool paradigm. The wrong kind of tool consolidation can result in capabilities being fragmented, tool sprawl, and incoherent business architecture.

Surveys also reveal that security teams are struggling with tool sprawl’s adverse effects, such as weariness, stress, and frustration, which might cause important security concerns to slip under teams’ radar as they try to stay up. Due to older security tooling either not supporting or being suited for securing cloud systems, hybrid cloud environments compound this problem. This forces organizations to look for more security measures for their cloud environments and incorporate them with their current on-premises security procedures and tools.