Today’s business environments are more sprawled than ever — users are accessing networks from point A to point B and everywhere in between. 

This has left many cybersecurity teams scrambling to cover all network points and users and ensure that gaps and silos don’t provide easy pathways for threat actors. 

The broadened physical and virtual environment blurs visibility and loosens control, making it difficult to track sensitive data, remain compliant and retain secure profiles between office and VPN users.

To gain back control in this complex landscape, more organizations are turning to security access service edge (SASE). This model seeks to reduce risk by moving security capabilities from the data center to the cloud and deploying a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). 

“SASE architecture is designed to solve the problem of network performance and limited security visibility for distributed corporate business systems (infrastructure, platforms and applications),” said Keith Thomas, principal architect for AT&T Cybersecurity. 

“This approach provides better network performance, greater security visibility and a better overall user experience.”

SASE defined

Gartner analysts coined the term SASE in 2019 and split it off into its own Magic Quadrant in early 2022. 

The firm identifies it as a “converged network” including SD-WAN, secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB),