Choosing Your Solution In addition to SD-WAN, ZTNA, CASB, SWG, RBI, and FWaaS, there is a number of other capabilities that should also be considered when choosing your SASE path. These would include DNS protection, sandboxing, and API/application protection. Your Trusted Advisor will be instrumental in helping you to assess the full range of options, including what should be done, and in what order they should be executed. As you map out your journey, it might become clear that you need fewer technology vendors than you have in the past. If such a move is feasible, this can potentially reduce costs and almost always results in streamlined management procedures and improved visibility into the functions of the network and its security components. In some cases, you can go from 10 vendors to perhaps two or three. Getting down to a single vendor is often impossible given that there are very few vendors, if any, that will be able to meet every requirement. You may have different options from different vendors that can be bundled together by the same SASE provider. These decisions should be prominent in your solution selection process, and your Trusted Advisor can be instrumental in helping you to make the right choices. “If you buy an SD-WAN product from one company and then a next generation firewall and secure web gateway from another, and CASB from someone else, it creates a hodge-podge of vendors that you have to manage,” said Peay of Cato. “In some cases, it also drags down performance for the user. Large enterprises often have fiefdoms in which they use certain products because they like them, but we end up with a hodge-podge. It helps to work with the C-suite as much as possible.” Copyright © 2021 AVANT Communications, Inc. AVANT | SASE 6-12 Report | 19