The adoption of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) among businesses has “skyrocketed” during the pandemic, according to a report from Versa Networks.
Polling 500 security and IT decision makers from the US, UK, France and Germany, the firm discovered that more than a third of businesses (34 percent) have adopted SASE in the past year, with an additional third (30 percent) planning to do so within the next twelve months. What’s more, SASE has overtaken VPN as the preferred means of connectivity.
During the pandemic, organizations across Europe sought seamless security and high-performing, reliable connectivity, both in cloud, hybrid and on-prem networks, mostly due to employees complaining about dropping connections, bandwidth-heavy applications and the lack of tech support. IT pros also struggled to enforce security policies, as well as to spot new cyber-threats that target their employees.
Many companies found a solution to these problems in SASE, but there’s still plenty of confusion among IT and security professionals about the technology.
According to Versa, less than a third (31 percent) of respondents managed to correctly define SASE, which is described as “the convergence of networking and security services like CASB, FWaaS and zero trust into a single cloud-native service model”.
“While the survey shows that there is still some work to do in educating IT and security professionals about the true meaning of SASE, the imperative to address both remote security and connectivity issues has led companies away from the old VPN technologies that were riddled with security holes towards SASE, which gives them a compass for the future,” said Michael Wood, CMO at Versa Networks.
“While SASE has served them well during lockdown, it will also prove a major asset as they contemplate the move back to the office and towards hybrid working.”
