In today’s global economy, many companies have employees distributed across multiple locations, such as headquarters and branch offices. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, remote working from home has also increased greatly in recent times. Wherever they are, a company’s staff will need to access IT services, applications and data that are also spread out over a number of physical locations. These could be within the company LAN, in a datacentre (private cloud), or public cloud. Hence, the solutions need to allow users in multiple locations to securely access permitted content distributed over further physical locations, which provides a challenge for IT departments.

In the past, multiple products might have been needed to control access from distributed users to data in distributed locations, resulting in a complicated management system with no real overview of all access policies and security measures. Secure access service edge (SASE) solutions aim to simplify this situation by allowing IT administrators to manage all the necessary security measures and access permissions from a single cloud-based management interface/ architecture.

SASE solutions can provide enterprises with secure, optimal and automated access to applications and workloads in the cloud, by extending software-defined networking and security to the doorstep of major IaaS and SaaS providers. Regardless of the location of users and applications, SASE provides unified secure access from a single management platform.