SASE manages your network access, but who manages your SASE?

COMMENTARY: Once upon a time, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), which provides network connectivity and security through a single, cloud-based platform, was a type of technology that was only within reach of large businesses. SASE solutions were expensive, and they often depended on legacy enterprise authentication or identity systems (like Active Directory) that smaller or newer organizations didn’t always operate.

That has changed. Today, the SASE market is more dynamic than ever, making it easy to find a solution tailored to a given business’s needs. At the same time, SASE solutions have become more flexible than ever. No matter what your network architecture or software stack looks like, there is a way to deploy SASE for it.

[SC Media Perspectives columns are written by a trusted community of SC Media cybersecurity subject matter experts. Read more Perspectives here.]

In this sense, SASE has been democratized, which is great news in a world where every year sets new records for the frequency and scale of cybersecurity attacks, making it paramount for organizations to find ways to secure distributed applications and users.

The growing challenge of SASE adoption

But there’s also some bad news: Along with SASE’s increasing power and flexibility come deep deployment and management challenges. SASE vendors themselves often don’t solve them; they simply provide network connectivity and security solutions, leaving it up to their customers to figure out how to deploy their software effectively.

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As a result, the barrier standing in the way of successful SASE adoption for many businesses has become expertise. Like other paradigm-shifting technologies (such as virtualization or the cloud), SASE is only effective and practical to implement if businesses have access to the deep expertise necessary to make SASE solutions work in the ways they require.

Why SASE management is challenging

To prove the point, let’s drill into the specifics of why modern SASE platforms are often so challenging to deploy and operate effectively. Key pain points include:

These are challenges that are often tough to solve, even for organizations with seasoned IT and networking staff. Because SASE is a fundamentally new type of approach to network connectivity and security, engineers accustomed to working with more traditional types of technologies, like VPNs and physical routers, may face a steep learning curve when tasked with setting up and maintaining a SASE solution.

The pitfalls of ineffective SASE management

Given that SASE solutions have effectively become the glue that bonds endpoints together in modern, distributed enterprises, the consequences of failing to implement and manage SASE effectively can be severe.

They include, for starters, the risk that applications or other resources won’t be accessible to those who need them. Imagine, for example, how business productivity suffers if a member of the sales team can’t connect to a business’s CRM because a SASE policy was not configured properly.

Even worse are the security risks that can emerge from SASE deployment and management oversights. Policy gaps or oversights may lead to situations where users are able to access sensitive data or applications that should not be accessible to them.

In addition, lack of effective monitoring may cause an organization to overlook malicious endpoints on a network, a risk that is all the greater given that traditional approaches to network security monitoring typically don’t work well in contexts where there is no fixed network perimeter. SASE monitoring has become critical for detecting risks in modern IT estates where endpoints can be anywhere.

An effective approach to SASE adoption

It’s possible to get ahead of these risks but doing so requires more than choosing a SASE solution and calling it a day.

Businesses must instead make it a priority to invest upfront in the expertise they need to set up and manage SASE effectively, either by acquiring in-house SASE experts or working with SASE service providers who have deep experience in deploying, configuring, integrating and administering SASE solutions.

The bottom line: Don’t let the increasing flexibility of SASE solutions disguise their complexity. While SASE vendors have, to their credit, made their technology more environment-agnostic and customizable than ever, this doesn’t mean that every IT department is ready to deploy and manage SASE effectively tomorrow. The expertise gap is real, and addressing it must be a part of every SASE adoption strategy.