The emerging security architecture

Besides providing visibility and better management for a more resilient network, SASE also makes it safer for businesses to adapt and innovate

- ARUN KARNA

The networking and security markets are clearly converging. Security is a top of mind issue for the vast majority of companies, governments, and institutions and with good reason. They have all been witnessing increased number of security attacks and which are more complex and increasingly sophisticated in nature.

Market drivers including increased number of remote workers, migration of enterprise applications away from enterprise data centers, proliferation of internet of things (IoT) devices, mobility, and now 5G and Wi-Fi 6 are coming to the mix are all driving networking and security to convergence.

Now network and security are not two separate discussions but these are now once single converged discussion. There is huge convergence of net ops and sec ops.

Applications are moving out of the data centre and into the cloud, more employees are working from remote locations than ever before, and data is being accessed from a wide range of company and personally owned devices. All these factors make it difficult for network and security administrators to know what applications and data are being accessed by whom as well as their usage. And what isn’t seen cannot be managed or secured.

There’s an ever-growing need for greater bandwidth. Business leaders also want to drive down cost. And now we have an army of remote workers numbering in the millions around the world. The likelihood is that many will continue to have some form of flexibility about where they work in the future, which means there’s a permanent problem to solve: the sheer numbers of people sitting outside of the traditional corporate network using the internet to access resources in the cloud, and how to optimize users’ experience and to help protect them and the data they use.