SASE Roundup: Versa, Prosimo Share Studies on Application Performance, Multi-Cloud

Businesses face serious application performance and security hurdles in the post-pandemic world.

Versa Networks and Prosimo have unveiled surveys that touch on businesses’ struggles connecting distributed workforces. The companies both commissioned Sapio Research to survey IT decision makers. Versa’s study asked respondents about their company’s secure access service edge (SASE) adoption. Prosimo’s asked respondents about application experience and multicloud transit while utilizing data from its own points of presence (PoPs).

Remote Workforces Stick

Versa’s study found that companies on average will keep 44% of their workforce at home permanently or on a semi-regular basis even after restrictions lift. Prosimo found that the shift to remote has helped increase the diversity of both users and applications. Device diversity has increased by 79%, and location diversity has gone up by 77%

Source: Prosimo State of Enterprise Multi-Cloud Infrastructure

Moreover, enterprises have by and large moved to the cloud. Versa’s study found that 84% of businesses have accelerated their cloud adoption and digital transformation plans.

Increased distribution has led to a key underlying concern: security. For Promiso’s respondents, growing user diversity has led to an increase in security vulnerabilities, which dwarfs worries about performance and speed. Similarly, 76% of Versa respondents said security risks are higher when employees are working from home.

Source: Prosimo State of Enterprise Multi-Cloud Infrastructure

SASE

Many companies are working to adopt a secure access service edge (SASE) posture in the next year, according to Versa’s report. Nearly two in three (64%) respondents say they have already adopted SASE or will in the next year.

Source: Versa Networks and Sapio Research, “Experiences and Attitudes Towards a Post-COVID Workforce”

However, the study pointed out a disconnect. Only 31% of respondents knew how to define SASE. While mostly every respondent touched on a component of SASE (such as the movement away from legacy architecture to the cloud), plenty of people missed Versa’s definition: “the convergence of networking and security services like CASB, FWaaS and zero trust into a single, cloud-native service model.” SASE is more than just SD-WAN 2.0.

Source: Versa Networks and Sapio Research, “Experiences and Attitudes Towards a Post-COVID Workforce”

SASE and IT

In addition, the IT team – not the security team, network team or C-suite – typically bears responsibility for SASE adoption. The IT shouldered the burden 61% of the time, although this number was significantly higher in the U.S. Fascinatingly, 28% of French companies relied on their board or C-suite to procure SASE infrastructure.

Versa chief marketing officer Michael Wood said IT and security teams have faced a major burden in the last year and will continue to face pressure.

“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 toward SASE, which gives them …