Make SASE a cornerstone to your digital transformation

SASE helps you deliver better business outcomes, modernize and secure access and support your journey to cloud and digital transformation initiatives.

Intense competition, complexity, evolving threats and new ways of working have forced enterprises to move away from the traditional perimeter networks to cloud networking and cloud-based security. As a result, IT and security leaders realize that to meet more rigorous business and security needs, their organizations need to adopt secure access service edge, or SASE.

SASE (pronounced “sassy”) is a framework that converges network services, such as software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), with cloud delivered network security technologies, such as like cloud access security broker (CASB), firewall as a service (FWaaS) and zero trust network access (ZTNA), into a single, cloud-delivered service model. This revolutionary framework has the potential to accelerate digital business, serve as a foundational element to zero trust security, and protect users and devices as they access resources anytime, anywhere.

With SASE, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and other IT and security leaders can accommodate their businesses’ rapidly changing needs, including secure remote access, without sacrificing security or business functions. The challenge is to do so end-to-end for their organizations.

The need for a new approach

A disappearing perimeter means that security needs to allow users to connect to the network from anywhere on any device with seamless and secured access to information and technology. As organizations transform and the diversity of the security environment expands, new security models like zero trust can help support dynamic security needs.

With new approaches to security, there are new opportunities but also hurdles to overcome. An organization needs to work through many cultural, technological, and strategic considerations. Siloed network and security functions may exist, strategies may need to converge, integration into a broader cloud security program is paramount, and policies must be centralized for more visibility and context.

To adopt SASE, organizations can start by planning toward a future state in mind, understand the capabilities needed for the future state, prioritize their outcomes based on business drivers, and approach the journey at pace that balances security against innovation and transformation. Understanding how to integrate existing investments into a new zero trust network architecture is key.

Augmenting a SASE provider solution with your own controls, requires the right strategy, architecture and deployment for your organization. With an all-encompassing strategy for SASE, you get many advantages using one vendor, such as security integration, continuous improvement, management and orchestration, and consolidation of technologies. In fact, when successfully designed, deployed and managed, an all-encompassing SASE solution can increase visibility across software as a service (SaaS), cloud and on-premises applications, and optimize perimeter-less security across your enterprise to close gaps and minimize risks.

The good news is there’s now a way to easily add an all-encompassing SASE solution to your operations. And there are several compelling reasons why you should do so.

Advantages of SASE include zero trust security alignment, consolidation, and support the move to cloud.

Adopting SASE for use in your organization can benefit in several respects. The following features indicate some major areas where SASE provides help.

• Support your business in its move to cloud and enable digital transformation:
  Aligning hybrid cloud security capabilities with a modern network architecture is a major challenge to address. SASE helps make this journey easier to accomplish with simplified and seamless network connectivity.


• Simplify IT and security operations and use resources more efficiently:
  SASE gives you more consistency within your operations through convergence. Additionally, using SASE simplifies centralized networking policy control with a zero trust approach, bringing context across users, devices, locations and networks.


• Better support a hybrid workforce and align with line-of-business needs better:
  The rise in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies for team members and more remote access for your third-parties can benefit the efficiency of your enterprise. SASE helps you make sure that you protect and safeguard network access and implements centralized and consistent access management to applications.


• Improve user access, productivity and security while minimizing costs:
  With SASE, you can scale your remote access infrastructure capacity, reduce latency associated a growing hybrid workforce using VPN, and consolidate and decommission legacy technologies.


• Reduce the number of unintegrated tools in the IT and security stack:
  Many businesses have limited technical on-site resources to support and secure critical business applications. By requiring fewer tools, enterprises like yours can reduce the expense of having to hire more experts.

There are specific areas where SASE helps you optimize these benefits. These use cases involve situations which many businesses face daily regarding security, access management and related issues.

A business driver approach to SASE can help organizations accelerating and achieving their business goals.

When properly applied, a case-centric approach to SASE helps your organization to reach several major business goals and objectives. An all-encompassing SASE solution can offer key components to address the business pressures your organization faces in the following critical use cases:

Go at your own accelerated pace to modernize your network and network security infrastructure.

When some people learn that SASE is a new framework to be deployed, they worry about the time and expense involved for the entire organization to embrace the change. SASE doesn’t have to be a rip and replace model. The good news is that the transformation can occur in a phased approach without disrupting your operations. Consider the following SASE maturity model as a guide to your journey and where your organization might expand its security and networking capabilities.

A SASE implementation should work with your existing technologies and allows you to add on services as needed. Various elements address at least one of the business drivers previously discussed.

The deployment process includes digital transformation with a transition to SD-WAN and adding the security component. The following diagram shows how these processes can occur in relation to the use cases.

An established way to get an end-to-end SASE strategy, migration and continuous improvement plan.

Installing a point solution is typically an insufficient and incomplete way to deploy SASE. You need a reference architecture that protects your data and applications through anything-to-anywhere access management. This means that all essential components connect with SASE, including workforce devices, SD-WAN, SaaS applications, the public cloud and more, as shown on the following image.

This illustration was in response to a study from the global research advisory firm Gartner, who first mentioned SASE in 2019 and found a lot of traction among vendors that addressed individual components of the SASE framework. In that report, Gartner’s authors wrote that “No vendor has a single, complete, integrated end-to-end solution based upon this architecture, nor is any likely to deliver one over the next three years.

“In the context of this research, ‘end to end’ means between the demarcation points that can be thought of as networking and security service edges, such as API gateways, ingress controllers, ADCs and SDWAN nodes. An initial implementation is likely to have two parts, each with its own ends: the client to the API boundary, and the API code to the services (perhaps via a mesh). It does not extend to the application code itself.”¹

In response to this prediction, IBM Security Services has developed a managed SASE solution that includes the key components of zero trust, network and network security transformation. This solution also provides a business-centric focus addressing key business drivers — from remote access to mergers and acquisitions and adapts to your needs rather than making you adjust to fit its requirements.

Ongoing steady management and best practices

IBM Security Services offers many elements as part of its comprehensive consulting and managed services for SASE. One is an extensive network of global operations with regional security centers. IBM is one of the largest global leaders in managed security services, recognized by leading industry analyst firms.

Another compelling feature is continuous improvement delivery capabilities to optimize security operations and provide expert guidance on program governance and strategy. Combined with worldwide coverage, IBM Security Services can collaboratively guide customers through their cloud-based network security and digital transformation journeys.

Consider a CISO of a major enterprise, who describes why he used a zero-trust solution based on SASE technologies from IBM Security Services as part of a three-year plan to protect the safety of data, operations and intellectual property while enabling business strategies.

For this global firm, the dedicated managed services from IBM Security Services reduced the amount of operation costs by more than 50 percent. We’re providing the firm with continued transformation support.

Get market-leading consulting and managed security services designed to meet your needs.

The approach of IBM Security Services is to deliver an end-to-end SASE solution that includes all key components of a zero trust-based governance framework. We design, deploy and manage a SASE solution for your on-premises, cloud and edge devices, and can help your organization achieve the following goals:

• Take advantage of SASE as a modern and secure network architecture
• Implement a phased deployment with zero trust best practices
• Accelerate your journey to the cloud
• Support your digital transformation initiatives

IBM Security Services for SASE can deliver the following better business outcomes:

As a trusted advisor and managed security services leader, our phased approach to SASE combines:

• An adoption strategy focused on key customer uses cases at a pace that suits you
• Zero trust network access security design best practices
• A successful deployment to replace older perimeter-based network solutions
• Ongoing monitoring and management to increase visibility into advanced attack types
• Improvement of infrastructure security policies to address critical business and security requirements
• An open ecosystem of the leading SASE providers

IBM Security Services can help deliver a complete and comprehensive network transformation you need. From rationalizing SASE provider capabilities with your own controls, determining a target future state based on maturity and supporting the overall pace at which your digital business transforms.

We can help your organization reach its full potential with SASE. Contact us for more information.

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