The SASE Architecture was Built for the Post COVID World

I've said it before only to be proven wrong…but I believe the end of the pandemic phase of COVID-19 is near. We seem to be entering the endemic phase where we learn to live with COVID-19 long term. The same is true for some of the changes that Covid has foist upon us. Specifically, that of the hybrid remote worker. Gone are the days of the Monday through Friday office commute for many in the aftertimes. According to a recent Info-Tech Research poll, 79% percent of companies survey said they would maintain a mix of in-office and home office workers long term. For many employees this is a long-overdue and welcome shift.

However, organizations have been struggling to adapt their security systems to this new work model. The security footprint of the organization has grown exponentially to include the residences of many of their employees. The traditional method of granting access to the corporate network involved providing the employee a VPN connection. This provided the "tunnel" by which remote workers could access internal resources such as databases, files shares, and other applications. Security was provided at the edge of the corporate network. In recent years many organization implemented a "Next Generation" Firewall at the corporate edge as well. The NG Firewall converged many technologies such as Web-filtering, anti-malware, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and SD-WAN into a single device. As the gatekeeper before most internal resources and end users this was an appropriate approach.

However, as more and more internal resources are moving to the cloud and the dramatic increase in remote work, enforcing security at the corporate edge begins to make less sense…