The term “Secure Access Service Edge” or SASE (pronounced ‘sassy’) was originally coined by Gartner in 2019 to identify an approach that uses cloud-based services to protect people consistently regardless of endpoint location.

Traditionally, an enterprise’s internet access has gone through security devices and services including firewalls, intrusion prevention, phish-blocking, and malicious detection systems. Additionally, security has included cloud access security brokers, content delivery networks, distributed denial-of-service protection, and web application security.

Replicating this environment at each remote site is expensive and can be difficult to manage. This is where SASE shows great promise.  SASE covers a broad range of network and security functions with the fundamental difference being that this movement is really about moving security systems/infrastructure into the cloud versus at the traditional network boundary.