Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is an all-encompassing term for a software platform that enables edge security. SASE is entirely cloud-native and cloud-run, though it can service on-prem networks as well. It delivers a wide access network (WAN) and security controls directly to end-users wherever they are on the network, even if they’re on the furthest edge of the network, from which the platform gets its name. Essentially, SASE provides safe, secure, and reliable internet access to your end-users while protecting your company and its data in one fell swoop. This is all performed regardless of user location or device type. SASE is enforced through a number of pre-set (either default or admin-defined) security policies that stay in place no matter how the user chooses to access their company network.
At a quick glance, SASE provides secure internet access to users who access your network outside of your data center (i.e., positioned on the “edge” of your network), leveraging the above-mentioned features and tools to do so.
Twingate is a California-based tech company specializing in network access security. Their robust Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution serves as an on-ramp for your existing SASE/SSE solution, offering complete and adaptive protection. Admins can enforce least-privilege access policies to establish a strong connection between endpoints and the corporate network. The solution easily integrates into your existing cloud-based environment, allowing for quick deployment without the need to change IP addresses or firewall walls, and without remapping network names.
Twingate can establish a direct peer-to-peer connection to protected resources, verifying all requests before granting access to users’ destinations. Identity and access are verified twice, with authorization confirmed through a second or third component before traffic is allowed to pass to another component or resource. The solution also implements a “universal 2FA” approach, enabling secure access to anything, including services without native 2FA such as SSH and RDP.
Other notable aspects of this product include direct peer-to-peer connections positioned behind your firewall, granular access policies, and strong logging and analytics features. Twingate offers a single and consolidated view of the network and access rules, defining and determining access by role. Role categories can assign access levels to employees, contractors, third-party vendors, and more, with specific rules for job functions and departments.
Overall, Twingate’s ZTNA provides pervasive, adaptive, and robust protection tailored to your company’s needs, offering a strong addition to your existing environment. It is highly accessible and recommended for SMBs and enterprises.
NordSecurity is a leading provider of online privacy and security solutions, trusted by over 15 million users globally. NordLayer is their remote access solution for businesses. Built in line with the principle of zero trust, NordLayer helps businesses secure remote access to their corporate networks. The solution also provides each of its customers with a dedicated account manager to maximize the value of their investment.
NordLayer’s one-click approach secures all data traffic with AES 256-bit encryption from the moment the user clicks on the gateway. The auto-connect feature provides a constant and immediate network connection for authorized and authenticated users, with network segmentation to ensure users can only access the areas of the network they need to do their job. Users can connect to the VPN with their existing business credentials or third-party multi-factor and biometric authentication, such as Azure AD, Google Workspace, Okta, and OneLogin, or single sign-on, without sacrificing security for convenience. If the connection to the server breaks, the Kill Switch feature automatically cuts off all internet traffic, ensuring that no unauthorized actors can access user data. From NordLayer’s single, centralized dashboard, admins can manage user accounts, permissions, and gateways, as well as access additional support from their designated account manager.
Alongside the platform’s remote access technology, NordLayer offers excellent support via live chat and email. The support team promises to respond to all inquiries within three hours, ensuring that customers receive prompt assistance. As NordLayer is a cloud-based solution, it’s highly scalable and can provide protection within a few hours of purchase. With three available plans – Basic, Advanced, and Enterprise – NordLayer is an accessible and user-friendly security solution for businesses of any size looking for quick setup and strong protection.
From market-leader Cisco is Cisco Umbrella–a comprehensive platform that offers a wide range of security products that can be configured and customized, including a flexible yet pervasive SASE solution. The solution delivers flexible and fast SD-WAN and a powerful secure web gateway, firewalls, DNS-layer protection, CASB, and threat intelligence capabilities to admins and your users at the very edge of your network. The platform supports organizations as they move from on-prem to the cloud, with the ability to scale up and down and enforce policies consistently across the entire network no matter the size, through APIs that seamlessly integrate your existing security stack with Cisco’s SASE. The platform has a range of deployment options and is quick and easy to deploy, maintain, and configure.
Through clean and consolidated dashboards that are initiative to use, admins have centralized management and visibility of the entire SASE product and subsequently their network. The platform provides extensive analytics and reporting from across the network for more efficient and effective troubleshooting. Management and onboarding of users is highly simplified and streamlined. The platform leverages a zero-trust network access (ZTNA) model, ensuring that every access request is verified and made secure. The constant need for verification for access provides heightened visibility into user behavior and access requests across your entire network. This model allows for rapid adoption of security policies across the network, cutting down the time from weeks to days and hours. Firewalls and filtering capabilities are particularly robust, with the platform’s L7 firewall being able to block any fake or non-approved applications and peer-to-peer file sharing and torrenting happening within the network.
A powerful solution that works best as part of a wider, consolidated security architecture, we would recommend Cisco’s SASE solution for large organizations with other Cisco products already implemented.
Cloudflare One is Cloudflare’s SASE platform that provides unified network connectivity services along with zero trust-based security services through Cloudflare’s global network. The network side of SASE is delivered by Cloudflare’s Magic WAN, a full and comprehensive cloud-native network-as-a-service tool that delivers fast, reliable, and safe connections to all of your users, no matter how close or far from the edge they may be. Magic WAN comes with a number of security features that are built into the tool itself, including zero trust functionality, traffic acceleration, DDoS protection, and more. The platform also utilizes a firewall-as-a-service, CASB, secure web gateway, remote browser isolation, and effective and consistently applied zero trust policies in order to deliver on the security side of the SASE coin. Overall, the platform is straightforward to onboard and manage with a minimal learning curve. Admins are granted a single pane view into the network, along with intuitive and easy-to-navigate dashboards.
The secure web gateway side of the solution effectively and quickly blocks known and unknown threats and controls data flows through the enforcement of DNS, network, HTTP, and browser isolation policies. Also included are email security, DNS filtering, data loss prevention capabilities, and access control via identity proxy and device posturing. The platform offers easy and full integration as you migrate your business to a SASE model, with the Cloudflare One service running in hundreds of cities around the world, with no need for manual integration of multiple point products. It delivers 155 Tbps capability, connecting with 11,000 networks across the globe, which include large ISPs, enterprises, and so on. Cloudflare On-ramps options include clientless, client tunnels, and direct.
With a focus on multi-tenancy in multi-national locations, we would recommend Cloudflare One for medium and large sized organizations with multinational branches, and MSPs looking to provide managed SASE to their clients.
Texas-based Forcepoint’s ONE SSE solution leverages their SD-WAN product: FlexEdge Secure SD-WAN. Forcepoint’s SD-WAN ensures faster cloud connectivity, with advanced network security and threat protection. The platform works as a whole on the principle of zero trust as its foundation, with zero trust policies and analytics. It has a CASB, a secure web gateway, and zero trust network access for all private applications. It also includes strong security services for threat protection and data security, including remote browser isolation, content disarm and reconstruction (CDR), antivirus, data loss prevention, and data classification. Users have especially liked the platform’s ease of deployment and management, as well as its frequent reporting and policy updating, which can be overseen through a clean and intuitive admin portal. The platform has also been praised for its customer service responses and effective troubleshooting when required.
Overall, the platform is highly adept in blocking a wide range of threats, including known and zero-day threats. It safeguards applications from anomalous behavior, which could lead to potential data leaks. The platform is robust in consistently applying policies, ensuring your organization stays within compliance regulations. Other notable features of the platform include cloud security posture management, which scans AWS, Azure, and GCP tenant settings for any configurations that may be deemed risky and supplies admins with manual and automated remediation, and SaaS security posture management, which applies the same features to the Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft 365 applications. RBI and CDR help to protect users from web-borne malware, with CXRE stripping malware from document and image downloads before being opened. Contextual access controls can restrict access based on a user’s location, role, behavior, device type, location, and more. Additional features include malware scanning and a unified management console.
Powerful and overarching, we would recommend Forcepoint ONE for large organizations prioritizing comprehensive security and unified management.
Founded in 2000 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California is Fortinet, an industry leader in a range of security products including their network security tools. Their contribution to the SASE arena is FortiSASE, a cloud-native security-as-a-service network edge security platform that helps secure your remote users without disrupting their network connection. Through a robust WAN and powerful security tools such as a firewall-as-a-service, intrusion prevention system, data loss prevention, a secure web gateway, and a zero-trust network access architecture, FortiSASE can enforce consistent security policies and a firewall at all times–regardless of your users’ locations. FortiSASE is driven by Fortinet’s “FortiOS”- a operating security platform and network that draws intel from a number of security and networking technologies in order to deliver “on the buzzer” threat intelligence, which helps in response times to breaches and attacks.
The platform delivers a clean and simple-to-use service for admins. It also offers a simple onboarding process with easy deployment options and streamlined management. FortiSASE provides extensive granular controls, in depth analytics, and auto-generated reports. It also includes highly granular event logging, user and endpoint activity reporting, and reporting on VPN events for more effective and specific troubleshooting. The platform leverages antivirus to prevent malware and other exploits; this antivirus is supplied with automated content updates, the latest malware detection engines, and an extensive threat library. A robust web filtering service provides admins with extensive insight into all web activity, with this service being supported by a frequently updated database with over 80 content categories. The application control feature can protect assets through the control of network app usage, blocking any suspicious traffic in real-time.
FortiSASE is a highly scalable solution, yet manageable on a small scale. As such, we would recommend FortiSASE for both SMBs and larger organizations.
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and founded in 1996, Juniper Networks is a cybersecurity company with a focus on network software security. Their SASE solution is a blend of their SD-WAN and Secure Service Edge (SSE) tools that leverage the cloud to optimize and enhance network security, improving user experience and streamlining certain processes for admins. Jupiter Networks’ platform offers unified management, ensuring that admins not only have extensive visibility into all activity and events, but that they can also easily manage security and policies across the network, regardless of how flexible, porous, or wide your network perimeter is. A highly intelligent and intuitive platform, Juniper’s SD-WAN utilizes artificial intelligence in order to strongly enhance user experience and provide detailed intel for admins on how to stay ahead of and remediate problems in real-time. This SD-WAN, when combined with the organization’s Juniper Secure Edge (SSE) solution, offers full and comprehensive SASE.
The SSE side of the platform contains a firewall-as-a-service, a CASB that provides granular controls and extensive visibility into SaaS applications, data loss prevention capabilities that classify and monitors data transactions, a secure web gateway, and advanced threat protection that aids in detecting and protecting against zero-day malware and other malicious activity. Advanced threat protection helps to enforce granular protection features, such as file quarantine and reduced access rights.
The entire platform is managed via the Security Director, Juniper’s portal to its SASE platform. Clean and initiative to use, admins can seamlessly and easily manage and deploy security policies across the entire network, no matter the environment. It also aids in automating threat remediation and micro-segmentation policies. Other notable features of this intelligent platform include DNS filtering, Intrusion detection and prevention services, content and URL filtering, adaptive threat profiling, compromised host isolation, and encrypted traffic insight, the latter of which aids in restoring insights lost after heavy encryption.
A manageable platform that requires a small inhouse team, we would recommend Juniper Network’s SASE for medium sized organizations.
Palo Alto Networks is a California-based industry-leading organization. Their SASE offering is Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE, a powerful solution that delivers secure internet and network access while protecting your users, endpoints, and data. In addition to the standard capabilities a SASE platform contains (SD-WAN, SWG, CASB, and so on), Prisma SASE also offers URL filtering, DNS security, malware protection, vulnerability protection and credential theft prevention under its tool belt, offering a more rounded and fully developed security coverage. Prisma SASE is a cloud-native program that leverages zero trust network access and an autonomous digital experience management (ADEM) solution for heightened and improved user experience. Overall, the platform is quick and simply to deploy, manage, and configure, with simple onboarding and deboarding of users and flexible deployment options.
Through a clean and intuitive dashboard, admins can have in-depth insights into the entire network along with simplified operations due to the consolidated management of all the security tools across the platform. This unified management, along with a shared data lake, makes for faster and more effective troubleshooting and remediation. The platform keeps teams in the loop with frequent reporting on logging and automates numerous security updates and performs patch preparation and deployment without external management. Prisma SASE also makes use of integrated AIOps capabilities in order to prevent outages and reduce downtime, overall improving security posture by detecting anomalies faster, predicting anomalies, automated troubleshooting, security policy analysis, and more. The product’s secure web gateway is cloud-based, effectively mitigating threats through static analysis and machine learning.
We would recommend Palo Alto Networks for large organizations, particularly with educational, governmental, and retail organizations in mind.
VMware is a popular cybersecurity vendor headquartered in Palo Alto, California and founded in 1998, known for their cloud and SaaS security products. Their SASE product, VMware SASE, includes an SD-WAN and ZTNA, a secure web gateway, data loss prevention capabilities, a CASB, and a firewall-as-a-service function. Users have praised the product for its initial set up, which is simple to execute. The product offers granular controls and extensive visibility, with in-depth reporting and analytics and web logs on all network traffic and emerging threats. Admins can manage and automate multi-cloud on-ramp and internet-as-a-service to AWS, Azure, and others. The product also comes with APIs that can help to automate a number of security processes and help with integration of your existing security stack.
VMware’s SD-WAN Cloud Gateways are a multi-tenant gateway service with policy control points and a footprint of over 2000 gateways that can assist with extensive application performance access and scalability. VMware SASE uses a cloud web security strategy that leverages the secure web gateway, CASB, and data loss prevention as well as robust URL filtering and remote browser isolation to ensure powerful security and secure internet browsing performed in real-time. Their firewall-as-a-service solution is a combination of a next-generation firewall, deep packet inspection, intrusion protection systems, and intrusion detection systems for identity-based inspection and protection. Also included in the package is the VMware Edge Network Intelligence feature, which enhances user experiences and assists admin and IT teams with artificial intelligence and machine learning-powered visibility across the entire product and network.
The platform is highly customizable to your organization’s needs, with flexible security options for your network edge, data center, and in the cloud. Easily scalable as needed yet manageable on a smaller level, we would recommend VMware for SMBs and large organizations alike.
A cloud-native platform, Zscaler SASE doesn’t require device management and separate services, allowing for a more cohesive solution that can aptly enforce the same policies across multiple locations. Offering robust internet connectivity to users, the solution also provides a secure web gateway, a CASB, which can protect tools such as Microsoft 365, a firewall-as-a-service, and zero trust network access. It can support a more streamlined move to the cloud for your organization without cumbersome network and security issues by consolidating and simplifying security processes.
The platform provides admins with a consolidated, clean dashboard and a single pane view into the entire network. IT teams have noted the platform for this feature, as well as its ease of use. It supports a multi-tenant architecture, with flexible scalability whilst maintaining strict data privacy and compliance regulations. Despite its strong ability to support multi-tenancy, the platform doesn’t require device management or separate services, reducing workloads for IT teams. It offers full inline SSL inspection which can be scaled; this feature is supported by a proxy-based architecture, providing effective and robust data loss prevention and threat protection capabilities. The platform is especially competent at proxy and content filtering.
Zscaler’s framework ensures that nothing about your users is visible, including their identities and IP addresses, which adds an extra layer of protection by reducing the attack surface area –attackers can’t attack what they can’t see. Optimization and application peering features ensure optimized traffic routing to enhance your users’ experience, and the platform also offers leading application and service providers for peer support.
A highly scalable platform that can support extensive multi-tenancy, we would recommend Zscaler’s SASE for large organizations and MSPs with numerous locations and a widespread user range.
What Is Security Access Service Edge?
Security access service edge (SASE) is an amalgamation of cloud security solutions and SD-WAN which is then delivered to users in a network–no matter how far or close to the edge of the network these users may be. Alongside SD-WAN, the security features SASE include are a firewall-as-a-service, secure web gateway, zero-trust access network, and a cloud access security broker. These tools work in tandem to provide secure and strong access to your company network as your users work and operate outside of your company’s traditional data center. It is entirely cloud-native and cloud-run, though it can service on-premise environments.
SASE can not only provide safe, secure, and reliable internet access to your end-users, it can also make sure that your data and network stay protected while your users access it. SASE and security can be enforced through pre-set protocols and security policies, which can either be default or customized that remain rigid and in place no matter the context of who or what is accessing the network.
What Are The Key Features Of SASE?
The main features of SASE are:
- SD-WAN: SD-WAN is a software approach to managing a Wide Area Network that is catered specifically for the cloud. It directs network traffic across the WAN to SaaS and IaaS providers, meaning that those outside of a data center can make a strong and reliable connection.
- Secure Web Gateway (SWG): A SWG acts as a barrier to prevent unauthorized traffic from accessing a network and will be implemented to reside at the edge of the network. It can control network and website access.
- Zero-Trust Network Access (ZTNA): This is a protocol that requires users to login every single time they wish to access a new application. Applications will be hidden from public view, with highly restricted access, to ensure that content and data on these applications stay safe.
- Cloud-Access Security Broker (CASB): This solution protections the connection between users and their devices to the cloud apps they’re connected to. A CASB will act as a security checkpoint and can enforce MFA and single sign-on.
- Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS): A FWaaS is a software or cloud-based firewall that can be deployed on cloud infrastructure to safeguard all users, apps, and data.
Do I Need A SASE Solution?
SASE can offer companies plenty of benefits in enhancing network connectivity and security for their users. It is particularly beneficial for sizable and multinational companies or companies with a large number of endpoints that exist outside the traditional on-premise environment, such as retail companies with stores in other locations.
Benefits of SASE include flexible and consistent security, with integrated features such as a next-gen firewall and threat detection and prevention capabilities, reduced complexity, and optimized performance as users should have no problem connecting to the network despite their location. SASE solutions are easily scalable, reduce complexity, and generally give admins and teams better insight and view into the network, its activity, and its users.
