Poor application experiences: Home-based workers might connect from anywhere. If you’re still routing all their traffic through a centralized data center, you introduce latency that diminishes application performance, especially for real-time video applications such as Zoom.

Increased risk: Adding thousands of user-owned devices to the IT environment makes it harder to protect against threats. Shifting architectures also make it easier for policies set by security teams to get lost in translation by network admins tasked with implementing them. Additionally, more workers may download web-based productivity applications that haven’t been cleared by corporate security and could pose a threat.

Operational complexity: As IT scrambled to connect home-based workers, they found themselves navigating a patchwork of legacy management and security solutions, struggling to understand interdependencies, and swiveling between tools to fix problems.

Pressure to support environments outside IT’s control: Users now access business applications from personal devices, connected to spotty Wi-Fi, over aging last-mile broadband networks. Problems can arise in any link of that chain — problems that users still expect IT to fix — even though IT has no visibility into most of that infrastructure.

Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) intelligence to route traffic over the best path to optimize application experiences

Zero-trust network access to extend secure connectivity wherever users work

Cloud-based security services that can be applied to traffic in-flight, instead of having to route it through the data center

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to gain deeper insight into edge experiences.

Improve application performance: SASE distributes your most important network and security functions out to the near edge (SASE PoPs) closer to users, reducing latency.

Optimize IT efficiency: By managing all networking and security functions for your distributed workforce through a single-pane-of-glass, you can rapidly solve problems and reduce countless trouble tickets consuming your time.

Strengthen security: Now, users can connect safely and easily from anywhere. With distributed cloud and web security, you gain more visibility into applications to quickly assess their reputation and risk. Also, security policy can now be configured centrally and implemented automatically, no interpretation required.

Better manage edge experiences: IT can’t be physically present at every user’s location. But you need visibility into each user’s experience, so when problems arise, you can determine if the issue resides with the application, the broadband network, or locally with the user. That way, you can quickly move to resolution instead of wasting time trying to determine the right group to handle a trouble ticket. These benefits don’t just apply to human users, but also to Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Fully integrated networking and security: The advantages of single-pane-of-glass management can be undermined quickly if security and SD-WAN sides of a SASE solution are separate technologies, sold together but not truly integrated.

Integrated AIOps: AIOps should be deeply embedded into your SASE solution, so you can better understand edge experiences without needing additional equipment.

Extensible architecture: Ensure your solution can scale services to meet today’s networking and security needs and support new edge compute-based services in the future.

Large, mature PoP footprint: The closer users and cloud apps are to SASE PoPs, the better performance you can expect. Look for SASE vendors with large footprints to provide the best user experience, and ample experience deploying and managing a global network of PoPs.