Cloud - Infrastructure - Security - SASE - Discuss!
Over the past 12 months, I’ve regularly talked about sassy SASE in this blog.
But I’m not the only one. A recent Netevents interactive debate had several vendors debating SASE as part of a general discussion about the changes in IT infrastructure being brought on by the partial, or whole, move to the cloud. Understandably, therefore, key to the thought process of IT operations in this move is the security element, hence the SASE observations. The principle of the debate was based around the belief that threat mitigation has to evolve to meet the needs of world where everything – users, devices and infrastructure itself – is highly distributed. The cloud, the Internet of things (IoT) and edge computing are inevitable consequences of the world’s insatiable appetite for compute power, storage, databases and other services at the point of need, which of course is where the SASE movement, coined by Gartner, sprang from.
Chair of the event, Jeff Wilson (Chief Analyst for Omdia’s Infrastructure Security Intelligence Service) talked about cloud migration, its inevitability, and how old security models are going to have to die. Wilson noted that the beauty of migrating IT infrastructure into the cloud is that you can do everything fast, you can take advantage of pricing or feature sets and new cloud infrastructure as it makes sense because everything’s portable and mobile, adding that, unfortunately, that doesn’t leave adequate time in the old model of security to develop and test your protection or even allow for visibility of that new infrastructure in the cloud. From this he concluded that the models for developing and deploying security have to change and the vendor and technology landscape is going to change to reflect this.
Wilson further noted that, as we move networks into the cloud, the influence of cloud-focused vendors rears its head in security: cloud-focused security vendors, the cloud providers themselves, MSPs, Telco’s, networking and security vendors – all have a major stake in in the cloud. And as those two worlds of cloud and security converge what we ended up with are the parallel trends of SASE – discuss! And they did. To hear what a gaggle of vendors said about this you can access the entire event here:
Unsurprisingly, the events of the past 15 months and the directions the pandemic has taken IT in, formed part of the discussion. On that note, I can only say in this blog that my next one will feature the customer reaction to those enforced changes, how that landscape looks for them and – as part of that – where SASE fits into their roadmaps. Watch this space closely…