How we got here

Over time, organizations have added many point security products to handle diverse cyber threats. With the increased adoption of cloud technologies, which bring the promise of agility and resiliency, organizations started migrating more applications out of the traditional data center to private and public clouds and SaaS, leading to a highly distributed environment. Coupled with today’s hybrid distributed workforce, the traditional perimeter no longer exists, and the attack surface increases substantially in this hyper-distributed IT environment. The traditional perimeter-based solutions fall short.

Additionally, 51% of respondents in the 2023 Global Networking Trends Report cited skills gaps as a main challenge to their organization’s use of cloud-native technologies. This lack of talent, along with human error, could be responsible for over half of significant cyber incidents by 2025, according to Gartner.

Networking and security convergence and a unified SASE

Converging networking and security domains brings end-to-end visibility into every connection so admins from both disciplines can work together to optimize the application experience. Integrated tools and a centralized dashboard increase efficiency and collaboration. With access to traffic data on every user experience, visibility gaps can be eliminated and mean time to repair (MTTR) times reduced.

Offering such a converged environment and centralized and unified management, SASE is a way to radically simplify security and networking (Figure 1). Gartner defines it as a multifaceted solution that delivers converged network and security as a service. Features include SD-WAN, secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), NGFW, and zero trust network access (ZTNA). SASE supports branch office, remote worker, and on-premises secure access use cases.

SASE provides a much-needed framework for securely and seamlessly connecting users to applications in complex and highly distributed environments. First described by Gartner in 2019, it has evolved rapidly from a disaggregated set of point solutions with many vendor solutions available in the market, to more comprehensive solutions from one or more vendors available as modular components (Figure 2).

With single-vendor solutions, a unified SASE approach emerges in which all components are fully designed, integrated, and supported as a single platform that can be optimized for SASE, merging network and security constructs to a cloud-delivered model. At Cisco, our SASE motto is “Interconnect everything and provide security everywhere,” end to end.

A unified SASE makes life much simpler for IT personnel. It’s a platform approach that focuses on outcomes instead of architecture and may be especially attractive to smaller organizations with fewer IT personnel.

Each of these approaches to SASE will appeal to different organizations, and Cisco meets our customers where they are in the technology journey—supporting all models.