How SASE Solutions Help You Operate in a Multicloud World

For thepast year or more, the transition to hybrid work has been forciblyturbo-charged, and it has brought into sharp focus the challenges enterprisesface around how to achieve this goal while maintaining consistent security andperformance.

The transition to multicloud

Overthe past few years, organizations have been shifting workloads and apps fromtheir data centres to multicloud environments. For many organizations, most oftheir critical traffic is now internet-based, but their continued reliance ondata centres at the heart of traditional backhauled architectures createsan unnecessary intermediary from a performance perspective. For end users atbranch and remote locations, the result is poor quality of experience (QoE) forcritical cloud-based workloads and apps that are forced to take a longerroute.

Naturally,a solution to improve QoE would be to allow internet-based traffic to bypassthe data centre altogether with direct internet access (DIA). But what aboutsecurity? It's precisely for this reason that many organizations stuck with(and some still do) the traditional hub-and-spoke architecture because of theenterprise security measures in place at the data centre.

In parallelbut still related, IT professionals have continued to deploy technologies toupgrade infrastructure and/or support new digital initiatives. There are many,often complicated, reasons why butultimately, most IT organizations run an infrastructure made up of multiplevendors' technologies. With each added vendor, an IT team's maintenance,management and security workload increases. Multivendor environments areinevitably siloed with often-complex integrations that yield limited visibilityat best. Generally, the only real way to identify a user experiencing poorperformance is via each user's helpdesk ticket.

Fundamentally,this type of complex environment is brittle and slow when challenged to changequickly.

How the pandemic amplified the need for user experience

Thegradual transition to a hybrid workforce happened overnight. IT teams suddenlyfound themselves supporting users spread across as many locations as there wereusers.

Inaddition to simply getting employees connected to the resources they needed,there was the gargantuan challenge of replicating data centre or branchsecurity measures outside of those locations. Followed closely after securityis QoE how can IT maximize the performance of critical employee workloads andapps outside the office's SD-WAN environment?

According to a study by Freeform Dynamics, demand for a streamlined, singular QoE will become paramount, and it looks like this need won't end with remote work set to continue in some form. A Gartner survey found that 90 percent of respondents expect to continue allowing remote work, at least part-time, even after most people have been vaccinated against COVID-19. 

How SASE can help deliver consistency

Theultimate problem that IT organizations are being asked to solve for over thelong-term is achieving consistency for security and QoEregardless of an end-user's location.

This iswhere SASE comes in, since it looks to deliver exactly this.

SASE,short for Secure Access Service Edge, and pronounced sassy, is a label for aconsolidated architectural solution that provides effective and homogenouslevels of security and experience for users from anywhere (i.e. the office,home, coffee shop, etc.) on any device. In order to achieve this, SASE proposesthe convergence of networking and network security functions and their shifttoward an as-a-service cloud edge model.

Thisarchitecture will be a true journey for enterprises, partners and vendors thatwill evolve over time. There are multiple factors that will influence how muchof the SASE architecture enterprises choose to implement and when.

Whetheryou've migrated to a multicloud environment already or are looking to do so,Cisco Meraki and CDW can help. Cisco's MX appliances are available asvirtualized images (vMX) which can be deployed in all major public clouds. Inthree simple clicks, Meraki Auto VPN technology can establish secure andoptimized connectivity from thousands of branch sites to vMXs in multicloudenvironments. To learn more, visit CDW.ca/cisconetworking