Hybrid and remote working are now the norm, making it critical for organizations to provide secure access to the data, tools, and resources employees need to do their job wherever they choose to work. Legacy technologies don’t provide the level of security and access control organizations need to combat today’s sophisticated and deliberate cyberattacks.
Enterprises must modernize their security solutions to defend against cyberthreats and attacks in a world where work is an activity, not a place. Research shows that cybercriminals can infiltrate up to 93% of company networks. This is where a secure access service edge (SASE) solution can help.
Why Enterprises Should Adopt SASE
SASE represents a paradigm shift from the traditional structure—where networking and security are two separate disciplines—to a unified approach in which security and connectivity converge. It is an emerging cybersecurity architecture that provides software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), firewall as a service (FWaaS), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), and Zero Trust network access (ZTNA) into a single, cloud-delivered service model that combines different security capabilities.
Because it’s cloud-based, SASE enables a more dynamic network that adapts to changing business requirements and an evolving threat landscape. This approach radically simplifies network management and protection. Rather than establishing a perimeter around the data center using a collection of security appliances, SASE transforms the perimeter into a set of cloud-based capabilities that can be deployed where and when they’re needed.
By adopting a SASE architecture, organizations can reduce network complexity by consolidating multiple vendor point solutions into a single cloud-delivered platform with management through a single pane of glass. This helps to reduce the IT workload and hiring costs.
Use Cases: How SASE Fits into Your Day-to-Day Business Operations
Organizational leaders need modern-day technology that works. SASE enables a multitude of use cases that protect a hybrid workforce:
1. VPN Replacement/Workforce Transformation
VPNs have served as the primary vehicle for securely connecting users to protected network resources for the past two decades. Unfortunately, VPNs were not designed for rapid scalability or application-level access. As many organizations have since learned, a limited number of VPNs will quickly devolve into a traffic bottleneck and inadvertently deliver too much access to those employees who can gain access. Conversely, scalability and application rather than network-level access are foundational aspects of what a SASE approach enables. SASE solutions enable identity-based authentication and secure remote access for all users, wherever they’re located, with the flexibility and scalability to easily address changes in
user numbers, offices, or workplace designations.
2. Edge Computing & IoT
In the coming decade, some of the most exciting innovations – from smart cities and autonomous vehicles to telehealth – will be enabled by a new generation of IoT devices installed at the network edge and beyond. While the promises of these connected things are compelling, they are also notoriously insecure. As a result, these devices have become attractive targets for threat actors. These multidirectional communications devices still provide IT teams with little-to-no visibility. With SASE, when an IoT device connects to the network, it becomes instantly visible in the cloud admin panel, allowing IT admins to enforce access policies and privileges dynamically.
3. WAN Modernization
Conventional perimeter-based security schemes were not designed to meet the demands of today’s cloud-first reality. For CIOs intent on achieving key strategic priorities such as cloud adoption and digital transformation, they have also come to appreciate that in order to do so, they must first modernize their wide area network to become software-defined. An SD-WAN platform automatically identifies and classifies application traffic at the network edge and effectively separates and secures it from other traffic on the network. By leveraging a SASE approach, IT teams can transform their WAN to provide direct, secure access to applications and services across a multicloud environment with great performance and resiliency.
4. Performance Assurance
Legacy networks were originally built for applications and data that never left the secure confines of corporate data centers. As these services expand beyond the network perimeter, ensuring peak performance of critical applications and services makes an already tough job even more challenging. Since SASE is deployed as a location-agnostic architecture, IT organizations can quickly shift their PoP exchanges and place them closer to familiar traffic sources and destinations. Fewer hops can mean lower network latency, better performance, and fewer opportunities for network traffic exploitation by threat actors.
5. Alleviate Operational Complexity
The increased complexity of operating in a hybrid, multicloud world makes it extremely difficult to manage performance efficiently. This is why simplification and security are two core principles driving today’s network modernization initiatives. By combining multiple security functions into a single, cloud-native service, a SASE approach can establish greater control by centralizing management capabilities, meaning fewer stand-alone point solutions that your IT staff must continuously tune and troubleshoot.
6. Cloud Adoption & Migration
The security controls that have become commonplace inside the data center were not built to meet the dynamic and distributed nature of modern multicloud environments. As a result, multiple point solutions have emerged to plug the cloud security gaps, including cloud access security broker (CASB) technologies to secure SaaS traffic and secure web gateway (SWG) technologies to secure web traffic. And as with any new solution, each must be carefully configured and managed, leading to additional complexity and potential risks. A SASE approach can accelerate application adoption and migration efforts by offering security services from a unified framework, applying consistent security policies to users regardless of location, and managing from a single console.
A Strong Partnership to Address All Your Security Needs
HCLTech and Palo Alto Networks are helping many organizations bring together network, security, manufacturing, and applications teams to achieve seamless digital transformation.
When working with a new customer, our teams perform an initial in-depth analysis of the organization's requirements to provide custom-tailored solutions and manage the entire deployment process. Together, we help our customers digitally transform how they provide their hybrid workforce secure access to the networks, data, and applications with little disruption in their networks.
Our partnership helped a Fortune 100 company transform their networking and security with Prisma SASE. In less than three months, the company migrated over 100,000 users from their VPN hardware, providing great cost savings by eliminating all VPN hardware and improving the end-user experience when accessing network resources.
With superior ZTNA 2.0 security, simplified operations, and exceptional user experience, Prisma SASE demonstrated itself to be the secure foundation for this agile, cloud-enabled organization. HCLTech's cybersecurity experts and Palo Alto Networks cybersecurity technology provide the right platform to assist you in designing and deploying a SASE architecture for your organization. Our Managed SASE solution is customizable based on the customer's needs.
Choosing the right security solution for your enterprise is not always a straightforward process. This is why having a plan to safeguard the security access of your business is essential. As you embark on your digital transformation journey, HCLTech, together with Palo Alto Networks, helps make your SASE journey simple.
For more on securing your multicloud infrastructure and leveraging our SASE framework, watch our LinkedIn Live Event. You will hear experts from HCLTech and Palo Alto Networks discuss critical components of SASE, its value to the business goals, and how organizations can undertake digital transformation efficiently and seamlessly.