During the last a number of years, corporations have needed to adapt to a altering panorama — transferring shortly to distant work, assembly new buyer expectations, and adopting new cloud and digital instruments. Though this era of change has been fraught with challenges, it’s additionally created a singular alternative for IT departments to play a number one function in shaping their organizations’ future.
Elevated adoption of SaaS and public cloud companies opens up new enterprise fashions and will increase agility, resiliency, and effectivity. Hybrid work fashions create larger flexibility for the workforce and permit entry to a world expertise pool. And department workplace transformation reimagines the workplace as a dynamic collaboration hub. These improvements can have transformative results on the enterprise, however they’re all underpinned by one factor: the community. Sadly, conventional hub-and-spoke networks make pursuing these initiatives sluggish and dear.
Limitations of legacy networks
Legacy Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks weren’t designed to deal with the demand positioned on them by the widespread use of cloud companies. Tunneling all visitors again to the information middle degrades the person expertise and limits worker productiveness.
Equally, conventional architectures leverage their knowledge facilities for VPN concentrators to which distant customers hook up with entry knowledge middle, but in addition cloud and SaaS, companies. Together with putting vital constraints on knowledge middle assets, the “trombone” impact provides latency, leading to a poor person expertise. To keep away from sluggish connectivity, many customers (sadly, even beneath the advisement of IT) will in the end disable VPN when doable, circumventing the standard safety stack, and placing the group at elevated threat.
The community architectures of the previous are holding again in the present day’s organizations which might be on the trail in direction of digital transformation, together with:
- Safety Gaps: The skyrocketing use of cloud companies and SaaS purposes, the problem of offering entry to customers wherever no matter location or system, the proliferation of IoT units, and different elements create safety gaps which might be tough and dear to fill.
- Inconsistent Safety: Utilizing totally different safety options for various use circumstances with essentially totally different safety capabilities makes it a problem to implement constant safety insurance policies.
- Operational Complexity: Will increase in discreet community safety instruments, entry insurance policies and controls unfold throughout bodily and digital networks restrict visibility and require fixed orchestration and administration.
- Scalability Challenges: The pandemic made the scalability limitations of hardware-based options painfully apparent, as many organizations tried to scale VPN capability to accommodate a 10x (or extra) improve in distant employees in a single day. Comparable challenges stay in the present day on an ongoing foundation as governmental and organizational insurance policies and worker preferences shift.
Take away the Highway Blocks of Digital Transformation with SASE
At the moment, we’ve got a singular alternative to rearchitect our networks to be as versatile and scalable as we’d like, to reimagine safety as one thing built-in somewhat than bolted-on, and to place the person on the middle of all the things. Moderately than focusing our community safety structure on sustaining a knowledge middle perimeter protected by way of a set of safety home equipment that also don’t shield all of our belongings, converging networking and community safety within the cloud permits us to rework the perimeter right into a set of cloud-based capabilities that may be deployed the place and once they’re wanted, streamlining segmentation by permitting granular, policy-based entry between customers and all purposes and companies, wherever they’re.
A unified SASE structure removes the safety, complexity and scalability challenges related to outdated architectures and permits the group to embrace digital transformation initiatives extra shortly.
Attend SASE Converge 2022
Within the coming days, Palo Alto Networks will host SASE Converge 2022, the business’s main convention on SASE. On this unique two-day digital summit, you’ll have the chance to be taught from business consultants and friends concerning the newest developments and improvements in SASE.
Jason Georgi serves as Palo Alto Networks’ world Area CTO for Prisma Entry and Prisma SASE. He focuses on constructing C-level relationships and advising consumer executives on the strategic alignment of cloud-delivered safety options as enablers of consumers’ cloud transformation journey.
