The market for managed security services is shifting as enterprises weigh their requirements for cloud-based security capabilities and vendors refine their feature sets and product integrations.
Converged security services can offer significant benefits to enterprises when it comes to manageability, scalability, security, and price, according to research firm Gartner, which introduced the term SASE, or secure access service edge. SASE is a network architecture that combines software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and security functionality into a unified cloud service that promises simplified WAN deployments, improved efficiency and security, and application-specific bandwidth policies.
A security-centric offshoot of SASE is security service edge, or SSE, which is essentially SASE minus the SD-WAN. SSE combines several key security functions – including a cloud-access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and a next-generation firewall – into a cloud-based service to streamline management.
