SASE adoption accelerating as workforce goes remote
In the wake of COVID-19, enterprises are racing to adopt Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE.
The concept, not even a year old, wasn’t expected to take root until 2024 at the earliest, according to forecasts, but that timeline has all but evaporated as companies address the security needs of an increasingly remote workforce.
Gartner coined the term in August 2019, describing SASE as a way for enterprises to protect their data, wherever it may be located, through a combination of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers (CASBs) and zero-trust network access. Neil MacDonald, vice president and distinguished analyst for Gartner, based in Stamford, Conn., originally projected about 40% of enterprises would adopt SASE by 2024, but he told SearchSecurity that companies are deploying the model today.
“You’re likely to see an acceleration of adoption, in the name of reduced costs and reduced complexity, later this year and throughout 2021 and 2022,” MacDonald said.
In terms of the revised forecast, Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, based in New York City, said she is also seeing more companies interested in SASE. Rather than SASE, however, Nemertes uses the acronym SCAPE — secure cloud access and policy enforcement — to define the new model. Johnson said the acronym SASE was too “telecom-centric and obscure” and ignored how companies do business today, which she defined as being “cloud-friendly and cloud-modeled, providing secure access to both cloud and on-prem resources and enabling comprehensive policy enforcement and protection across those resources.”