THE PROLIFERATION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY HAS TURNED BUSINESS INSIDE OUT

Operations increasingly exist in a digital framework: employees travel for client meetings or work remotely, retail clerks take orders anywhere in the store, manufacturing and warehouse employees use tablets while on the floor, IoT devices gather data and perform advanced AI functions, and more. All are accessing data and apps that may be located in the cloud. What was once locked away in the data center has broken through the walls. Users – and what they need – can be anywhere.

Demands on IT infrastructure have changed as a result. While mobile work has grown tremendously and truly distributed edge computing has become a reality, many companies still depend on relatively centralized hub-and-spoke architectures.

In a hub-and-spoke architecture, the network backhauls traffic to a central hub, where it passes through multiple security devices. Afterward, the traffic moves out to the eventual destination, like a cloud service, for example. Return traffic retraces the same inefficient path. The result is poor user experiences due to data latencies, increased operational complexity from managing multiple point security and management products, longer troubleshooting times, and more difficult change management.

The structure limits a company’s operational flexibility, increases costs, makes it difficult to provide unified security, and wastes enormous opportunities.

An emerging approach to infrastructure, called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), offers a cohesive yet incremental approach to creating a new context for computing. SASE sits atop software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) by integrating security capabilities. The combined services can be managed in cloud implementations and delivered on premises or via cloud, depending on users’ requirements.

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