The Challenges of a Classic SASE Solution
SASE has massive potential to improve corporate security and the usability of an organization’s security infrastructure. However, classic SASE solutions — which rely solely on cloud-based, integrated SASE solutions — may not be an immediate fit for many organizations.
Some of the main challenges of classic SASE solutions include:
- Limited Resources: Many organizations have limited IT and security resources. A large-scale rip-and-replace to upgrade existing solutions to SASE all at once may be infeasible.
- Existing Solutions: Large enterprises may have made significant investments in existing technology and have unexpired service contracts that limit their ability to replace these solutions with SASE solutions.
- Security Requirements: Many organizations use hardware firewalls to monitor and secure east-west traffic within their networks. Replacing these with cloud-based SASE solutions may be infeasible at this time.
- Regulatory Requirements: Companies are subject to regulations that often specify that certain security controls be in place for compliance. These regulations may lag behind the technology and mandate the use of certain solutions to achieve compliance.
The Need for a Flexible SASE Solution
With converged security and centralized visibility and management, security teams can more effectively manage and secure their environments. SASE enables consistent policy and identity management across on-prem and cloud environments and unified visibility and logging on-prem and in the cloud.
However, most organizations face challenges in making the transition from their existing security architectures to a full SASE solution. The roadblocks to SASE adoption may delay rollout or prevent an organization from pursuing it entirely.
A flexible SASE solution enables companies to start making the transition to SASE from wherever they are. By supporting a range of SASE endpoints and enabling incremental transitions, flexible SASE can overcome the SASE transition challenges of small businesses and large enterprises alike.
What is Hybrid SASE?
Hybrid SASE is a new approach to implementing SASE that supports incremental transitions to a full SASE deployment. Instead of requiring companies to transition all security assets over to cloud-based solutions, hybrid SASE supports a combination of hardware-based and cloud-based solutions.
Despite this flexibility in SASE solution form factors, hybrid SASE provides the benefits of SASE. By enabling centralized visibility and policy management, hybrid SASE allows security teams to streamline security operations and enforce consistent security policies across the entire organization while still making the transition to a full SASE deployment.
Benefits of Hybrid SASE
Hybrid SASE provides organizations with the ability to make a slower, more planned transition from their existing security architecture to a fully cloud-based SASE deployment. Some of the benefits that hybrid SASE solutions offer in contrast to traditional SASE include the following:
- Flexible Enforcement Points: Use a range of enforcement points, including on-prem firewalls or cloud-based firewall as a service (FWaaS) offerings.
- Unified Policy Management: Manage security from a single console and reuse objects and existing policy from on-prem firewalls in cloud firewalls and FWaaS offerings.
- Secure Everything: Implement consistent security for all parts of the enterprise, including branches, cloud infrastructure, data centers, headquarters, and remote users.
- Simplified Pricing: Hybrid SASE may offer a simple pricing model that allows utilization of either enforcement point (on-prem or cloud-based).
- Seamless Transition: Hybrid SASE enables a transition from existing security solutions to a cybersecurity mesh architecture and hybrid mesh firewall architecture that offers consistent identity, policy, and logging and security operations across the entire corporate IT architecture.
Hybrid SASE with Harmony SASE
Most organizations plan to implement SASE or are already in the process of doing so. And this comes as no surprise, as SASE offers the ability to simplify and streamline security operations while ensuring that enterprise-grade security protection and visibility extend to all corners of the corporate network, including on-prem, cloud, branches, data centers, and remote workers.
Harmony SASE enables organizations to overcome the challenges of making the move to a classic SASE deployment by offering hybrid SASE functionality. With Harmony SASE, companies can implement SASE functionality via hardware firewalls, cloud firewalls, or FWaaS offerings. Learn more about Harmony SASE and how it can ease your organization’s transition to SASE by signing up for a free demo today.
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