By: Gabriel Gomane, Senior Product Marketing Manager at HPE Aruba Networking
As organizations are moving to a cloud-centric architecture, where most applications reside in the cloud and the demand for hybrid work environment increases, security must evolve in parallel:
- Legacy VPNs have often provided poor user experience. Additionally, usage of VPNs without granular controls could over-extend network privilege, granting users more access to resources than necessary, increasing security risks.
- Traditional network architectures routed application traffic to the data center for security inspection, which is no longer practical, and impacted application performance since most applications now reside in the cloud.
- With data increasingly hosted in SaaS applications, organizations need to take extra steps to protect their data. Sensitive data can indeed be stored in both sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud applications (or shadow IT), and may travel over unsecured links, leading to potential risk of data loss.
- Employees are vulnerable to web-based threats such as phishing attacks and ransomware when browsing the internet or simply accessing emails.
- The explosion of IoT devices in the recent years have significantly increased the attack surface. However, IoT devices are often built on a simple design and lack sophisticated security mechanisms.
- Finally, organizations must comply with regulatory mandates such as HIPAA or GDPR but often lack the essentials tools and comprehensive reports needed to demonstrate compliance.
SASE, Secure Access Service Edge, helps tackle these challenges by combining SD-WAN with SSE (Security Service Edge).