Wide-area networks (WANs) have connected remote office locations to corporate headquarters for decades now. Put satellite offices on the corporate network, so the reasoning went, and now remote employees can connect to all internal applications and data available to any headquarters-based cube dweller.
Furthermore, WANs extended the corporate security perimeter, effectively drawing a line in the sand around all those remote locations that attackers would be loath to cross.
Ah, those were the days.
Today, enterprises are likely to turn to SD-WAN technology to leverage a mix of private networks and broadband. The goal: rearchitect the WAN to afford connectivity to an increasingly diverse collection of remote offices, pop-up locations, and individual employees working from coffee shops, client locations, and today, from home – what we can call the WAN edge.
Those employees all want to access cloud-based resources – and they certainly don’t want their traffic to take a detour through the corporate data center to get to the cloud if they can help it.
Furthermore, perimeter-based security is now woefully inadequate to deal with the cloud generally, or to address the exploding threat surface that today’s burgeoning WAN edge represents.
From mobile devices to the Internet of Things (IoT), modern cybersecurity requires a complete revamp of the perimeter-based approaches of yore. This new take on security is the secure edge.
Predictably, many products have entered the market to provide the connectivity advantages of SD-WAN and address the limitations of perimeter-based security. Given that providing remote connectivity and securing that connectivity are interrelated, so too are the products that seek to address these challenges.
As a reaction to this plethora of products, several vendors have sought to combine WAN edge and secure edge capabilities onto a single platform that offers more than traditional SD-WAN – what Gartner calls a Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE.
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