SASE is the future of data security
Our daily business practices are increasingly happening in the cloud. Much of our data is stored there, including sensitive data, which faces many emerging risks. What about security practices? Designed in a traditional form, when sensitive data remains essentially on site, it appears to be anachronistic, if not outdated. In fact, most people who access data are not equipped to deal with the scale of the cloud infrastructure and the corresponding vulnerabilities. Today, data moves everywhere and organizations need a security framework designed to protect that data.
One of the frameworks designed to meet the challenges of the modern cloud security environment is SASE (Secure Access Services Edge).
What is SASE?
SASE is a cybersecurity framework designed for today’s remote work environment, where the perimeter or “edge” of corporate networks is no longer defined by the four walls of your organization. It aims to integrate security and network functionality into the work environment.
Each application or cloud platform has different standard security policies, or even no default security policies. Managing each of them individually will take up all of the IT team’s time and resources, and you can’t be sure that the same policies are being applied to your entire infrastructure. Additionally, employees often use personal or unmanaged devices. As a result, an organization’s ability to see what’s happening in cloud services and enforce common security policies is reduced.
To determine what poses a threat, security teams need to understand the context in which an employee is trying to access certain data. For this, visibility and control are important. CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) and ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) solutions allow you to do this in the cloud, privately or on premises infrastructure and applications. Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) allow you to monitor and control access to parallel computing on the Internet. If you can add contextual signals from laptops and mobile devices to endpoint protection, you’re more likely to implement similar policies across your infrastructure and data.
The more contextual data points you have, the more you can ensure that only authorized users are accessing your sensitive data through known and secure endpoints. Together, these elements form the essential components of a successful SASE strategy.
There is a misconception that SASE is only useful for large enterprises, but all organizations using sensitive data in a hybrid environment (cloud and on-premises) can consider SASE as an option to recover visibility. and control without traditional security products. in a cloudy environment.
How to Implement a SASE Policy
As with any major security implementation, SASE policy deployment is a journey that can vary from organization to organization.
One of the biggest challenges has to do with strategy and mindset. For decades, IT and security teams have treated various areas of security as a specialty, be it data loss prevention (DLP) or GDS. As a result, even with security products delivered by default in cloud services, organizations continue to buy products focused on different use cases and divide their security operations into siled teams. To take advantage of SASEs, you need to adopt a unified platform approach rather than a check-the-box mentality.
At the scale of the deployment, implementing the SASE policy can be done in the short term, but it won’t be a drastic change that happens overnight. For any organization, you have to start with the areas with the highest added value. It may be proprietary software that you run on premises and now requires remote access. This includes Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to ensure that access is granular and dynamic and does not expose the rest of your corporate network. You may have cloud applications that contain sensitive and proprietary data, which you can start putting behind a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB).
One of the main questions is whether these different functions – for example, ZTNA, CASB or SWG – can integrate with each other. Some vendors sell these SASE technologies separately, but they may not be well integrated. One way to overcome this obstacle is to use a unified platform.
An important test of whether a platform is integrated is to assess its monitoring and policy enforcement capabilities. A suitable SASE solution should provide full visibility into user behavior, endpoint health, and the sensitivity of the data being manipulated. The platform then needs to use that data and enforce consistent policies for cloud apps, private apps, and internet access.
The future of security
In summary: It is now necessary to extend your security apparatus beyond the traditional perimeter. Security architectures must adapt to existing cloud-based business models and adapt to a perimeter that is now constantly on the move.
