Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) emerged as a Gartner buzzword in 2019. Since then, vendors have populated the cloud security market with numerous SASE products and services. Getting to the root of SASE means understanding a bit about Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs), the Anything as a Service (XaaS) market and the current state of cloud software security.
Put simply, SASE combines network security functions together with principles of SD-WAN. SASE is typically delivered on-demand in the cloud, as a managed service — part of the ever-expanding tapestry of “as a Service” solutions made possible by cloud computing. SD-WAN enables IT departments to direct network connectivity and functionality as discrete software functions instead of relying on specialized networking hardware.
