You’ve likely heard a lot about the term Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) lately.

Originally coined by Gartner in 2019, SASE has become a widely used phrase to describe a type of networking architecture that combines SD-WAN and cloud-native security tools to deliver protected network access to the source or ’edge’ of each connection.

SASE has a huge potential, tackling the security challenges that come with opening up the traditional network perimeter with cloud and internet-based technologies like SD-WAN. But it’s not a new concept, just a new way of looking for the answers.

In 2021, everyone was talking about working fully from home, but the conversation has now shifted to hybrid working or ‘working from anywhere’. We’re seeing and expecting many workforces to adopt new, mixed working patterns – splitting their time between the office, home and on the move.

To make each connection experience successful, cloud adoption is essential. It enables companies to be mobile and connect employees to their critical applications and remote data wherever they are, with shared or public connections.

But this shift towards a more flexible workforce means many employees will be operating beyond the reach or visibility of their organisations’ security architecture. This increases the risk of exposure to unknown threats, so it’s important they take a Zero Trust approach to the cloud, and ensure access from any location or device is verified and secured.

At its core, that’s what SASE brings to the table. It enforces a consistent security policy across every edge of your expanding network, helping you authenticate and monitor every end user wherever they are. SASE ensures every session is entirely secure, and your sensitive data remains where you want it.

While many of our customers are still relatively early on their transformation journey to SASE, it’s increasingly clear that all organisations using SD-WAN to deliver cloud-based services will need this level of protection.

Successful delivery of SASE will require you to change how you think about the relationship between your network and security departments. Many organisations still treat them as separate towers but, with SASE, the technology converges, and so does the service wrap. And that provides the ability to unlock value for your business.

By bringing remote access security, policy management, threat prevention, and full content inspection into one place, you get accurate visibility and control of these elements from a single source and dashboard. The value to you is a reduced operational cost with the ability to diagnose and resolve network and security issues faster. For businesses to stay ahead, it’s clear that they can’t avoid aligning their network and security departments.

We know how important protecting your data has become. SASE will help organisations combine holistic security solutions to safeguard their futures in the cloud. Joining up and understanding the interaction between different security elements will become easier - taking the services directly from the cloud will mean protection is extended farther and wider, and integration is less complex.

We’re seeing the emergence of two key routes for SASE delivery in the market:

• A single vendor ecosystem integrated with SD-WAN.
• A multi-vendor, hybrid stack solution that combines SD-WAN with cloud security.

At VMware, our current SASE focus is to create a single vendor ecosystem, converging cloud networking and cloud security to deliver flexibility, agility, and scale for enterprises of all sizes and geographies. And by combining VMware technology and BT expertise, we’ll be able to support you fully on your security aims, and on your journey towards a managed end-to-end SASE solution.

If you’re not looking for this approach, don't worry. BT also offers organisations the choice of a hybrid-stack managed SASE solution.

Find out more about our managed SASE solution.