In the first blog post in our series on Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), we looked at the need for a unified approach to securing the hybrid workforce, the complex application landscape, and the rapidly expanding attack surface.
In Part 2, we’ll consider key challenges with traditional security approaches and how a strategic and unified SASE approach can help. we’ll also highlight how SASE architecture from Citrix can help IT, security, and networking professionals to unify, secure, and simplify the work experience, across every work channel and location, in distributed environments.
Challenges with Traditional Network Security Approaches
Traditional security models, point products, and redundant firewalls located primarily in datacenters (Figure 1) aren’t suited anymore to meet the needs of today’s hybrid workforce and complex app-security requirements. While you can use specific point products to address specific cybersecurity concerns, this approach often proves to be inefficient for enterprise IT teams, which face common challenges like:
- Disjointed management: Multiple complex and hard-to-manage, siloed technologies
- Too much work: Overwhelmed IT staff due to rapid usage and high dependency on VPN
- Slower cloud adoption: Complexity of transitioning to a cloud/multi-cloud architecture
- Cyberthreat risks: Siloed point products can’t provide broad protection against cyberattacks
- Poor user experience: Higher latency to access cloud apps when backhauling traffic to the datacenter
- Expensive: Overspending on siloed, redundant, and disjointed security technology increases costs
What, exactly, is SASE?
SASE is a leading architectural framework that can help you reduce complexities in today’s distributed enterprise environments and simplify secure access for your hybrid workforce. SASE brings together SD-WAN and comprehensive cloud-delivered security services including zero trust network access (ZTNA), firewall as a service, secure web gateway (SWG), and cloud access security broker (CASB) into a unified architecture.
Together, these enable organizations to provide fast, secure, remote access to all internal and external apps across public and private clouds, web, internet, and software as a service (SaaS), without straining IT. And they’re built to meet the complex needs of distributed hybrid workforces.
A Strategic and Unified Approach to SASE
Historically, networking and security solutions were delivered as point products resided in the datacenter and managed in siloes, creating a bottleneck that affected user experience and increased IT complexity. Solutions that are designed from the ground up with a unified approach to bring simplicity and consolidation of best-of-breed networking and security technologies can provide the true value of a SASE model.
Key characteristics of a unified and complete SASE solution are:
- Comprehensive cloud-delivered security stack
- Optimized application experience through resilient connectivity
- Unified management & orchestration across networking and security
- Global and consistent presence with points of presence
- Maintain customer data privacy to meet compliance and regulatory requirements
The Citrix approach to SASE brings together networking and security into a unified solution that supports a simpler way to secure access to apps and data, without complicating the user experience.
“The Citrix portfolio encompasses a wide range of solutions that assist organizations to enable a burgeoning hybrid workforce, specifically offering secure access to applications with a modern, reliable, and unified approach to SASE.” — ESG: Embracing the hybrid workforce, March 2021
Citrix’s fully unified, ready-to-deploy SASE solutions portfolio delivers all Gartner “core” and “recommended” SASE capabilities. The solution integrates a comprehensive cloud-delivered security stack with resilient connectivity through Citrix SD-WAN to empower your hybrid workforce with the best, most secure access experience through Citrix Workspace and for all apps.
Simplify the Journey to SASE with Citrix
Citrix SASE solutions can help to improve enterprise app availability and simplify secure access through unified management, with a zero trust security approach. The solutions eliminate the need to backhaul all traffic for all users and branches through your datacenter security stack. Citrix SASE solutions provide a robust, flexible, and effective model that enables a phased deployment approach and can be partially or fully deployed in your environment today.
SASE is all about enabling a simple and secure access experience for your hybrid workforce while reducing cost and complexity and requiring less effort to manage the environment. You need to be able to continuously monitor SASE hygiene and quickly adapt your access policies or scale up/down your access based on your business needs.
Key Benefits of Citrix SASE Architecture
There are many business initiatives and benefits to implementing a unified and single vendor SASE architecture for modern enterprise environments. Here are some key benefits of implementing a SASE architecture:
- Improved user experience: Eliminate latency from backhauled connections and experience consistent connectivity performance even as internet performance fluctuates.
- Reduce attack surface with comprehensive security: Protects all users at any location against all threats at scale by combining zero trust network access with cloud-delivered security to secure access to all types of applications including private/internal, web/internet, or SaaS. Continuous, identity, and risk-aware application access minimize the enterprise attack surface.
- Enhance IT agility and simplify operations: Consolidate vendors across networking and security with a single-vendor approach that will offer deeper integrations and unified management to simplify deployment, configuration, reporting, and support services. With more security services moving to the cloud, the overall hardware footprint is reduced, which improves architectural elasticity and scale.
Coming up next: How to accelerate your SASE journey
In the next blog post in our SASE series, we will outline how to plan and accelerate your SASE journey leveraging a unified and complete SASE architecture.
