Cyber Security
Defining the role of SASE in a connected future
T By Nick Savvides, Senior Director of Strategic Business APAC, Forcepoint
38 | Cyber Risk Leaders Magazine
he onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has catapulted Australian businesses towards digital transformation at a rate CIOs and CISOs around the country previously thought impossible. The mass closure of physical workspaces not only created an immediate need for remote working solutions, but also major changes and compromises in business continuity plans and security practices. Very quickly the market was flooded with those racing to the cloud. The move to cloud is not new and has been gaining significant momentum over the last 5 years. As offerings have continued to mature and diversify, more and more activities are being delivered from the cloud. It hasn’t just changed applications and systems that we use but has also changed the way we build and even think about building applications. Whether it’s storing data, team collaboration and task automation, supply chain optimisation, or controlling IoT devices, most things have been touched by the cloud. However, cloud use suddenly needed to be significantly more integrated into day-to-day operations when the working-from-home army was unable to use their employers’ onsite connections.
This gave rise to three problems for IT teams across the country: How to extend their company’s networks and resources to all remote workers; how to optimise delivery of on-premises and cloud apps in use for remote access; and how to monitor and secure all their users and network traffic efficiently. Limited on both resources and time, IT personnel quickly instituted a multitude of solutions, and often bypassed established security controls to make sure data flow and productivity wasn’t hindered. It was an important moment for many IT and cyber-security teams to learn that the business always wins – when presented with an existential threat, no matter the objections, the business will demand agility and flexibility on things that would normally be non-negotiables. Now, a few months in, most of us are in a good place vis-a-vis remote working. However, the ad hoc solutions that got us here aren’t necessarily suited for the long-term, and few companies have implemented a permanent solution that would mitigate disruption from future calamities. A solution to our current predicament presents itself in the form of a 2019 proposal by Gartner, known as ‘SASE’ (pronounced ‘sassy’).
