Secure Access Secure Edge (SASE)

What SASE Is

One way that we can secure the edge of our network is with SASE.

SASE stands for secure access — so we're accessing our network, and it's securing that access to them — and secure edge. A lot of what we're talking about here has to do with the perimeter, and securing the perimeter and the connection between our different devices.

The first thing you need to understand about SASE is that it's a bunch of different products altogether. It's not just a single product, although often it's sold as a single product. I look at SASE as being more of a marketing term: there's a lot of companies out there that are selling these SASE products, but really where the term stemmed from was Gartner. Gartner evaluates different companies and their products, and I think what they were seeing is this common grouping of products that were out there, and they determined that this should be its own category, so to speak. So they coined this term SASE — one of their employees did, in one of the articles that they had.

What Goes Into a SASE Product

What goes into a SASE product can vary a bit. There are certain things that are required, like SD-WAN, a secure web gateway, a cloud access security broker, and zero trust network access. So there are different things that go into what this product has that's required. And then there are some recommended components, and then there are optional components. So really, what a SASE product looks like could vary quite a bit, as long as the core components are in it.

The base foundation of a SASE product is the SD-WAN, or the software-defined wide area network. I've already talked about SD-WAN technologies in another lesson, but essentially what this is is interconnecting our WAN technologies and making it much more dynamic. So we already start off with a platform of a very dynamic setup, but what we're adding when it comes to SASE is that secure web gateway, that cloud access security broker, the zero trust network access, or ZTNA, and firewall as a service. So essentially what this is is that we're adding a lot of security components to these edge locations. And by adding all of these extra security components, we're really locking down our network and securing our network.

What Deployment Looks Like

So let's look at what this actually entails. Let's say we have a new site, or this is a new router that we're adding to the bunch, and maybe it's got a couple of LANs that are hanging off of it. What we do is we then set it up to talk to this controller. And then we maybe connect it to the internet or somehow connect it to other routers. But now it gets involved in the rest of this network, and we don't have to go through a lot of extra configuration of configuring a separate secure web gateway on it, and a cloud access security broker, and a zero trust network access. Instead, this just all kind of comes in one package. So essentially it makes it much easier to deploy, because all of these services are interconnected.

And the same thing goes true for laptops that we put out there, or desktops, or other machines that we set out there: we set this up on the client machine here, and then it can be added to the network as well, as if it's just another node on this very dynamic network.

A Buzzword That Turned Pro

I do look at this as a bit of a buzzword that turned pro. What do I mean by that? Well, it is definitely a marketing term that a lot of companies use out there, and it really isn't just one product that makes this SASE product. So it just depends on how these companies bundle up their product, and that's what you're getting. I call it a buzzword turning pro because it's a buzzword, it's kind of a marketing term that's out there, but it's become so well known and so well used that now we just accept it as being a product in itself.