Wherever you are in your network transformation journey, is it time to consider SASE?
From start-ups to global leaders, across the public and private sectors, organisations' ongoing growth and brand reputation rises or falls based on the quality of their networks. As a result, network transformation is a growing priority, with IT leaders looking to replace cumbersome legacy systems with flexible, scalable, and secure connections that support tomorrow's highly dynamic workflows.
Consider the following trends:
- 85% of enterprise workloads will be migrated to the Cloud by 20251
- Of 1,100 professionals surveyed, 63% were working remotely at least part of the time2
- 66% of organisations were affected by some form of malware in 20233
- Unsecured protocols continue to be widely used across corporate WAN, with 62% of all web application traffic being HTTP, 54% telnet, and 46% SMB v1 or v2 (rather than SMBv3), creating vulnerabilities that attackers are actively exploiting4
As many forward-thinking IT leaders have already realised, networking has moved beyond simply deploying cross-site connections. Customers now expect services to be of the very highest quality across a range of channels, while employees communicate and collaborate with geographically dispersed colleagues on a virtually non-stop basis, helping drive innovation and maintain exceptional service quality. Indeed, a September 2024 survey5 reported that 63% of UK employees surveyed worked remotely at least part of the time.
Cyber security (as always) is a key concern here. The increasing volumes of critical data flowing in and out of corporate infrastructure each day mean that legacy security ecosystems are frequently showing their limitations. IT and network teams must maintain full control and visibility of corporate networks, while ensuring compliance obligations have been met, corporate security policies are consistently applied at the edge, and critical applications - including the new breed of Cloud platforms - are readily available, wherever and whenever employees require them.
It's a lot to consider, and faced with this growing range of concerns, too many organisations are forced to supplement their legacy networks with multiple additional solutions in order to ensure security and compliance can be maintained, both on-site and at the edge, which inevitably creates challenges. Indeed, Gartner have already predicted that 60% of enterprises will have explicit strategies and timelines for SASE adoption by 20255.
When we take all this into account, the increasing adoption of SASE, particularly single-vendor solutions - is unsurprising. The convergence of best-of-breed networking and cyber security as a single, Cloud-ready platform is simply the natural culmination of years of ongoing transformation, offering a single answer to numerous complex challenges.
If you would like to find out more about the ongoing evolution of networking technologies and their emerging convergence with cyber security, we invite you to download our exclusive whitepaper, MPLS, SD-WAN, and the Evolution of SASE: A practical guide to implementing your ideal next-gen WAN solution.
Inside, we explore the respective advantages of the foundational networking technologies, and SASE's emergence as the ideal solution for tomorrow's perimeter-less networks. Armed with this information, you will be well-placed to establish exactly where you currently are in your own network transformation journey, establish clear goals, and make an informed decision about which solutions will help you achieve them.
1. Gartner, 2021 2. https://www.forbes.com/uk/advisor/business/remote-work-statistics/ 3. Deloitte, Annual Cyber Threat Report, 2024 4. The Cato CTRL SASE Threat Report, Q1 2024 4. Gartner, 2021 Strategic Roadmap for SASE Convergence
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