What is SASE? A brief history of Secure Access Service Edge

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) has been around for a few years. Gartner created the term in 2019 when researchers observed new use cases and buying patterns in digital transformation. If you’ve watched long-term trends in business workflows and network design, the growing adoption of the SASE concept should come as no surprise.  

You may recall the old hub-and-spoke wide area network (WAN) topology that companies used to connect remote branch offices to a main business office. The employees at the branch office would use main office servers for network authentication, centralized file storage, and other network services. Prior to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications like Microsoft 365, email servers that supported the entire company were commonly located in just one location. Directory services and security policies were also centralized in this way. Businesses would lease expensive lines for dedicated connectivity between offices. Backhauling traffic from the branch office to the main office across leased lines was the accepted way to ensure remote employees had the access they required.

Companies would eventually turn to virtual private networks (VPN) and software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) to replace leased lines and reduce connectivity costs. Over time it became easier and less expensive to move applications and workloads to the cloud and allow branch offices to access those resources directly. Branch office firewalls were perfect for this because they enabled the connectivity between the offices, enforced the security policies from the main office firewall, and optimized traffic according to local workload priority. 

It became clear that the public cloud offered benefits that could not be matched by on-premises servers and applications. As business applications transformed to SaaS models and the public cloud became easier to use, companies further reduced their on-premises resources. This aligned perfectly with the trend of employees performing more work from home or at a client location. Many employees had no need to access internal networks anymore, and those who did need such access were using VPNs or remote desktop protocol (RDP). This resulted in multiple logins for these employees, constraints and latencies in their workflows, and extra administrative overhead for IT teams. 

Gartner evaluated these trends and how they impacted network performance and business security needs. Researchers identified the need to combine multiple network and security technologies into a single scalable offering. This is what SASE is and how it came to be.

Benefits of SASE

SASE is useful for several reasons. First and foremost, it recognizes that a network might not have a traditional perimeter. This is important because employees need a consistent user experience throughout their workflows, and companies need a consistent security posture throughout the enterprise. A properly constructed SASE network will allow any internet-connected entity to securely access any authorized, connected resource. This outcome is due to the combination of network services like SD-WAN and security services like firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS). 

SASE networks are also easier to scale and manage than traditional perimeter-based networks. Bandwidth use can automatically adjust on demand, and costs are usually easier to predict. SaaS and cloud licensing is easier to budget and buy than on-premises hardware and software. In short, SASE allows companies to offload a lot of IT overhead to one or two technology vendors. 

Barracuda CloudGen WAN and Barracuda CloudGen Access can help you leverage the benefits of a SASE network. For more information and a risk-free trial of our SASE solutions, visit our website here.