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The capabilities that SASE delivers aren't new and include SD-WAN, threat prevention, remote access, and others that were available from multiple vendors over the years.
So, what is, in fact, new about SASE? This is the main topic for our discussion with Yishay Yovel, Chief Marketing Office at Cato Networks, one of the first companies that entered the SASE market.
THN: Cato had been a big proponent of SASE. Why is SASE important to end customers?
Yishay: SASE is a wake-up call for our industry and IT organizations. IT infrastructure got fragmented with many point solutions that, in turn, created complexity, rigidity, high cost, and increased risk. These are systemic issues. Each point product by itself does its job, but together they are becoming very difficult to handle. Something had to change.
Cato was founded in 2015 to address that problem. The solution we created is a new converged networking and security platform that is delivered as a global cloud service. Same excellent capabilities, but in a single platform, single management, self-maintaining, and self-healing. In 2019, Gartner came up with SASE that is very much aligned with our vision.
SASE is, therefore, a way for customers to simplify their infrastructure, consume it as a service, and provide secure and optimized access to all users and applications anywhere they do business.
THN: This sounds like a very big promise. How is SASE relevant to customers during the pandemic?
Yishay: SASE is a very good example that the right architecture is key to a timely response to changing business conditions. Imagine you have invested in a ton of branch equipment – firewalls, SD-WAN appliances, even MPLS. All these investments are sitting idle with everyone working from home. SASE, on the other hand, is a cloud-first architecture.
According to Gartner, SASE is delivered from cloud Points of Presence (PoPs), that provide various security and optimization capabilities to users. This is important because a user can move from the office to her home, connect to the SASE cloud-service with a lightweight device agent and get basically that same protection and optimization as if she were in the office.
In short, SASE enables work from anywhere. Now, we had remote VPN solutions for 20 years, but they were built for road warriors, a small part of the organization, and for short sessions. We need totally different scalability and distribution than what VPN can't offer.
This is how SASE with built-in Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is both eliminating VPN point solutions and providing a better overall service. In Cato's case, we saw our remote access usage spike 300% in the first two months of the pandemic, without a hiccup.
THN: You mention that SASE is a cloud-first architecture, but it seems like not all vendors agree. Why is that?
Yishay: SASE is very difficult for legacy box vendors. If your business is built on selling cheap boxes that try to pack all SASE capabilities, you are not addressing the true architectural problems SASE is trying to solve.
First, sizing and scaling – you need to make sure the appliance you put in can support all the different capabilities today and in the next few years. This isn't a trivial task – security and networking features have very different processing requirements, and it is hard to determine what is the right size you will need (multiplied by the number of locations and their particular requirements).
Second, you need to manage patches and updates almost box-by-box. Third, you need these boxes distributed all over the world – either in your branches or in colocation facilities. Fourth, you need to handle scenarios where remote users need secure access to cloud applications when the appliance isn't in a line of sight. And lastly, you are making a location-bound investment –users go out of the office, and the capabilities they need can't follow them.
SASE eliminates all these issues. It is cloud-scale, so you do not have to worry about scaling. It is maintained by the cloud service provider, so no patching is needed. It is distributed globally through multiple points of presence (PoPs), so no colocations and hubs. It can see and protect all traffic, so no need for backhauling. And, because it is not "stuck in the office", – it can serve users anywhere.
Basically, these appliance-oriented SASE solutions are trying to convince you that you don't need SASE at all. What they offer as SASE is the same legacy approach they sold in the last few decades. A cloud-first architecture isn't an optional feature of SASE; it is the essence of SASE – without a cloud service, there can be no SASE.
THN: Let me make this a bit more difficult. What about scenarios when traffic needs to be secured inside a datacenter?
Yishay: SASE is focused on the wide-area network (WAN). This is traffic that goes between branches, data centers, users, and clouds. This is the traffic that drives business today. The cloud is the best place to secure and optimize that traffic. Obviously, if you can't use cloud services or have specific requirements within a datacenter, SASE wasn't created to solve that problem.
If I have 1,000 branches and 20,000 users that can benefit from SASE and one datacenter that can't, would I still prefer an appliance-based SASE architecture? I think it makes sense to handle the exception as such instead of enslaving the entire infrastructure to the wrong architecture.
THN: We see security companies like zScaler, Palo Alto Networks, and Netskope also joining the SASE race. Isn't SASE more about security than networking?
Yishay: SASE is the convergence of the networking (specifically, WAN edge) with security in the cloud. If you "count features," there are more security features than networking features in SASE. But, in our customers, the need to change the network architecture to become more cloud and mobile-oriented is what drives the necessary change in the security architecture.
Therefore, some security vendors are adding SD-WAN capabilities to their offering to get better aligned with SASE. Other vendors partner with SD-WAN vendors, but obviously, this is weakening their single platform story.
Customers will have to choose between a single architecture that delivers end-to-end optimization and control vs. some form of do-it-yourself integration of multiple products. We think the primary trend over the next few years will tend to favor the simplicity of a single converged platform delivered as a service.
THN: Thanks for the insight. Where can readers learn more about SASE?
Yishay: we have recently created a "SASE for Dummies" book, which is available to download for free via our website. I want to encourage the readers to think critically about the different SASE architectures as they consider their next networking and security refresh. We are seeing tremendous customer benefits from adopting SASE, and we believe it will, as Gartner predicts, truly transform the IT landscape over the next few years.
