How to Select the Best SASE Solution for Your Hybrid Organization

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions offer a reliable and flexible method for providing your hybrid, work-from-anywhere (WFA) employees with safe, authenticated access to critical applications and resources.

The best SASE solutions combine secure remote access, advanced per-session and per-application authentication, and enterprise-grade security in a single cloud-based solution. They extend the same protections and performance to remote workers that they experience when working from traditional on-premises locations.

Consider Core Use Cases Organizations must carefully consider several critical capabilities across core use cases when evaluating SASE solutions because not all are the same—application-specific access, security features, and security efficacy can vary widely.

Every organization has a rapidly expanding attack surface due to more hybrid environments, new connectivity options, and additional business-critical applications deployed into the cloud. To ensure consistent connectivity and security for users everywhere, networking and security solutions must converge at the edges and in the cloud.

Seamless Integration

At its most basic level, SASE combines multiple Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS) and Security-as-a-Service(SaaS) functions into a single solution. This can be difficult to achieve when trying to integrate solutions from different vendors. However, a platform-centric, single-vendor SASE solution enables the consolidation of technologies and converges networking and security functions to drive operational efficiency.

However, SASE solutions don’t exist in a vacuum. So, it is also critical for organizations to look for SASE solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into their larger networking and security architectures to ensure secure and reliable connectivity and to deliver a superior user experience. SASE is a better way to deliver cybersecurity technologies using a convergence of cloud software and networking tools.

Seven Considerations When Selecting a SASE Solution

When it comes to evaluating critical capabilities and selecting the best SASE solution to protect your WFA workforce, there are seven core considerations to look for:

1. A single-vendor SASE approach

Trying to get solutions from different vendors to work together as a unified SASE architecture is not just difficult to build, but it can be time-consuming to maintain and troubleshoot. A single-vendor SASE approach converges networking and security, so management, optimization, and policy enforcement are all controlled through a single interface.

Ideally, the single-vendor solution should also interoperate across the distributed network, seamlessly handing off connections between the cloud and on-premises devices. This allows access and security policies to follow users and applications end to end rather than terminating connectivity and control at either edge of the network.

Only by truly converging networking and security across the entire business environment can organizations implement a comprehensive zero-trust architecture that delivers consistent security and superior user experience everywhere.

2. A unified agent for multiple use cases

Onboarding different agents for every use case can quickly become too complex and expensive to maintain. An effective SASE solution should offer a single agent that supports multiple use cases, including ZTNA, cloud access security broker (CASB), and endpoint protection, while automatically redirecting traffic to protect assets and applications through cloud-delivered security.

3. Secure internet access

An effective SASE solution will include secure web gateway (SWG) capabilities to monitor and protect data and applications against web-based attack tactics along with other features such as URL filtering, DNS security, anti-phishing, antivirus, anti-malware, sandboxing, and deep-SSL inspection.

4. Flexible, secure private access

Your SASE solution should seamlessly integrate with SD-WAN and NGFW solutions to provide intelligent steering and dynamic routing capabilities through the SASE PoP, ensuring superior user experience by automatically finding and securing the shortest path to corporate applications. And ideally, it should provide all of this through a single agent for ZTNA, traffic redirection, CASB, and endpoint protection.

5. Secure SaaS access

Organizations should look for a SASE solution that:

• Offers visibility into key SaaS applications
• Reports on risky applications
• Provides granular control of applications to secure sensitive data
• Detects and remediates malware in applications across both managed and unmanaged devices

6. Flexible consumption with simplified onboarding

Considerations for selecting a SASE solution should go beyond just the technology. They should also include how you pay for it. The right SASE can help organizations shift their business consumption from a capital expenditure (CapEx) to an operating expenditure (OpEx) model.

To do this effectively, the SASE solution should offer simple, tiered licensing that enables organizations to predict a cost-to-business growth correlation and use of security—rather than tying up capital in excess hardware.

7. Simple cloud-based management

A cloud-based SASE management system should provide comprehensive visibility, reporting, logging, and analytics. This helps ensure efficient security operations while reducing mean time to detection (MTTD) and remediation (MTTR). The challenge is that SASE security elements that operate as siloed point solutions can place unnecessary burdens on security teams—especially for organizations managing a hybrid environment with limited IT resources.

This integration can be even more effective if the SASE components deployed in the cloud seamlessly interoperate with on-premises security solutions for consistent policy orchestration and enforcement.

Working from Anywhere Without Worry

When implemented correctly with the requisite capabilities to solve core use cases, the right SASE solution can deliver secure and reliable access to disparate workforces while providing enterprise-grade, cloud-delivered security to harden remote connections. But furthermore, a well-chosen solution can also help your organization focus on core business tasks while removing the need to manually manage complex integrations, delivering a consistent security posture across your evolving hybrid IT environments end to end.

Learn more about FortiSASE and how Fortinet can deliver SASE solutions that provide consistent security and user experience no matter where users and applications are distributed.