SASE: The Landscape Secure Access Service Edge (better known as “SASE,” and pronounced “sassy”) is widely viewed as a critical foundation to providing security in the rapidly expanding environment of cloud computing. Advocates will note that SASE is also an important path towards improving application performance, but AVANT Research & Analytics has learned that the security component is pre-eminent. More than two-thirds of the respondents in our survey point to security as the main benefit of SASE. The reasoning is compelling. What once was a relatively straightforward equation of building a virtual moat around the network perimeter has become infinitely more complicated, given that the notion of the network perimeter, itself, has become obsolete in a borderless cloud-based environment in which almost anything can be delivered “as a service.” While this phenomenon had been gaining momentum for several years, the Covid-19 pandemic further accelerated the trend as work from home was no longer the exception but became the fundamental means of conducting business. Numerous studies show that many employees have a strong preference for a work-from-home paradigm, and some are even quitting their current jobs in favor of employers willing to accommodate that preference. Amidst a veritable Rubik’s Cube of locations and conditions, effective security becomes more important and more challenging than ever. SASE is a security model, typically cloud-based, which bundles software-defined networking with network security functions, all of which are delivered by a single provider using multiple points-of-presence (POPs) to maintain high performance on a global basis. SASE combines critical network security functions, such as CASB, RBI, SWG, and ZTNA, with WAN capabilities (e.g. SD-WAN) to deliver secure services and applications at reliable performance levels. Each of these technologies will be defined and further explored below. As is common with most new(ish) technology concepts, SASE definitions can vary widely as vendors and service providers strive to advance public perceptions that best match their own product/service lines and, by extension, their respective installed bases. Copyright © 2021 AVANT Communications, Inc. AVANT | SASE 6-12 Report | 6