The benefits of a SASE approach to hybrid infrastructure security

Organizations today can no longer kid themselves. Without a modernized infrastructure that can evolve as business requirements shift, they’re going to fall behind their competitors. Which is why you should be adopting a hybrid IT approach.

With a framework that consists of workloads both on-premises and in the cloud, your business will be more flexible, agile, and better positioned to properly support a dispersed workforce that relies on countless devices – including, sometimes, BYOD – to work effectively. However, a hybrid approach does present some challenges if you have limited experience.

In an earlier post, we outlined one of those challenges: connectivity. Companies that begin migrating more and more workloads to the cloud must know how to maintain that connectivity. But it doesn’t stop there.

Equally important is aptly securing your hybrid infrastructure – and that’s no small feat.

Why protecting hybrid infrastructure is difficult

Protecting a typical on-premises environment is straightforward. It boils down to securing the perimeter. The problem with a hybrid infrastructure is that a traditional perimeter doesn’t exist.

There are multiple ways to get in and out of an environment and deploying a firewall in a virtual environment isn’t as cut and dry. Additionally, the approach for securing an on-premises environment doesn’t translate to the cloud.

For instance, when you deploy a firewall or an intrusion prevention system (IPS) in the physical world, you choose the features and determine how fast it needs to be and what kind of performance is required. You then purchase the hardware you need to meet those requirements. It doesn’t work that way in the cloud because, unlike on-premises infrastructure, the perimeter isn’t as easily defined, making it harder to guard.

Organizations that treat physical and virtual configurations the same way will not only experience suboptimal performance, but they’ll also open themselves up to possible security vulnerabilities.

So, how should organizations secure this modernized infrastructure?

Securing hybrid infrastructure with SASE

As businesses grow and their IT infrastructures become more complex, and users continue to connect from different locations in different ways – mobile, tablets, PCs – via various cloud platforms and software as a service (SaaS) applications, they require a security method that can meet these demands.

Introducing: secure access service edge (SASE).

SASE isn’t a product, but rather a cloud-based security approach that’s designed for distributed organizations that are growing from both an infrastructure and workforce standpoint. With this forward-thinking framework, “networking and security converge into a single integrated service.”

Ultimately, SASE functions at the cloud edge, offering your hybrid infrastructure the protection it needs without sacrificing performance.

The benefits of SASE

Modernized architectures require a modern approach to security. SASE’s “modular view of security architecture” does just that. But the benefits don’t stop there. Organizations also gain:

1. Enhanced user experience. With SASE, business policy, permissions, and processes are extended to user connections at the point of exchange. By bringing security to the end user, not the other way around, SASE enables you to optimize direct connections to various cloud and services. The result: enhanced user experience.
2. More flexibility. As a cloud-based offering, SASE makes it simple to add additional services to your security posture.
3. Greater control. Easily add data protection policies to help prevent unauthorized users, while offering greater visibility.
4. Simplicity and scalability. By combining once separate security functions, SASE scales back the number of products and vendors you may have relied on, reducing overall complexity. In addition, uniting security and networking enables you to meet the demands of multicloud at scale.
5. Improved performance. Users can easily connect to resources where they’re located.

A security approach to match your growing business needs

Companies were already starting to accept a hybrid workforce. But the pandemic sped up the adoption, making it almost essential for businesses to remain, well, in business.

However, as remote work grew more commonplace and businesses began utilizing more cloud resources, the question of how to effectively secure this increasingly complex and dispersed environment became more important.

By utilizing a SASE approach, organizations can reduce complexity, improve user experience and performance, and construct a security framework that better supports their evolving hybrid infrastructure.

SHI can help you create and deploy a SASE architecture using Cisco solutions and give you the integrated security your organization needs to meet its growing needs. Want to learn more? Contact SHI today.