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This article explores the Security Service Edge (SSE) portion of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and the need for holistic cybersecurity protections.
We lightly touch upon the drivers for tighter enterprise security and then dive into what SSE is, comparing its architecture and migration path to SASE to a 360-degree SSE approach which offers complete visibility, optimization and control with a seamless path to SASE convergence.
How Security Service Edge (SSE) fits into SASE’s Security Pillars
This article covers:
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Legacy security architectures presupposed security as local and siloed with appliances everywhere. Unfortunately, these architectures produced protection, performance, and visibility gaps, so the overall security requirements for enterprises have proven this model insufficient.
This outdated approach influenced the need for security simplification and assumes enterprises replace these architectures with a strategy that will:
Security Service Edge (SSE) is new category introduced by Gartner, two years after SASE, and represents an essential step toward simplifying complex security architectures by consolidating them into cloud-delivered services. This allows enterprises to quickly adapt to new business and technical challenges like cloud migration, the growing hybrid workforce, etc.
The figure below represents the basic SSE architecture and its protection scheme:
Basic SSE Architecture and its protection scheme
SSE consolidates SWG, CASB, DLP, and ZTNA and represents a small portion of the security pillars of SASE. However, diving deeper into what SSE delivers versus what businesses require, we realize that basic SSE lacks full security protection and has coverage shortcomings, as pictured below:
The digital transformation is pushing applications to the cloud, the 2020-2022 pandemic shifted employees to work from home, and the number of resulting new use cases is sending IT leaders scrambling for answers. The number of solutions IT departments have had to adopt to ensure their network's performance and security has continuously grown for over a decade.
The recent trends have greatly accelerated this process. When looking into ways to help mitigate this complexity, one of the leading conclusions is that enterprises should find ways to consolidate their separate, stand-alone, products into a unified solution which can be more easily managed and maintained, and which can provide them with a consistent and a holistic view of all traffic in their network.
Gartner has gone a step further and designed a framework that facilitates this, which they named the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). SASE is, in essence, an architecture that converges networking and security capabilities into a single solution and goes a long way in reducing network complexity.
Before we talk about the networking and security services that SASE converges, let's first look at the entities and traffic flows they need to serve.
The journey starts at any of the enterprise's endpoints which need to access any of the enterprise's assets or external resources. The origin endpoints are typically users who can connect from any of the enterprise's physical locations or remotely. Physical locations are typically enterprise headquarters or branch offices, which connect between themselves or to other enterprise locations such as physical or cloud-based datacenters. Enterprises typically use an MPLS and/or SD-WAN product to connect their physical locations:
Traditional MPLS VPN Network
Mobile & Remote users will use a remote access solution to connect to their networks. Cloud-based services such as AWS, Azure will require virtual connectors, or other secure tunnel solutions to connect to the enterprise network and remote offices use a private managed MPLS service to connect to the headquaters.
As we can see, a modern digital enterprise needs to connect various types of endpoints that are spread across multiple locations.
So how is it possible to converge network and security services for such a dispersed network topology?
The only real option, as Gartner stated, is to use a cloud service to which all network endpoints can connect and which is capable of delivering all required services. This is precisely what Cato's SASE Cloud platform offers:
SASE Architecture Example
Each endpoint connects to the nearest Cato Point-of-Presense (PoP). All traffic sent from the endpoint is processed by the PoP's full software stack that provides all networking and security services.
Want to see it in action? Sign up for a trial by clicking here.
The convergence takes place deep inside the PoP, within the Single Pass Cloud Engine (SPACE). SPACE ensures all services are applied with a single, unified, context which provides them with a holistic view, enabling a better-informed decision process. While its implementation takes place "under the hood", convergence, much like justice, must be seen to be done. A solution that doesn't look converged, is probably not.
Another major benefit of the Cato converged SASE network is the reduction of jitter and packet loss, already covered in a previous article using a real scenario.
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Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is an architecture widely regarded as the future of enterprise networking and security. In previous articles we talked about the benefits of a converged, cloud-delivered, SASE service which can deliver necessary networking and security services to all enterprise edges. But what does "cloud delivered" mean exactly? And are all cloud services the same?
We’ll be covering the above and more in this article:
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While we all use cloud services daily for both work and personal benefit, we typically don't give much thought to what actually goes on in the elusive place we fondly call "the cloud". For most people, "the cloud" means they are just using someone else’s computer. For most cloud services, this definition is a good enough, as we don't need to know, nor care, about what they do behind the scenes.
For cloud services delivering enterprise networking and security services, however, this matters a lot. The difference between a true cloud-native architecture and software simply deployed in a cloud environment, can have detrimental impact on the availability, stability, performance, and security of your enterprise.
Let's take a look at what cloud-native means, and the importance it plays in our network.
In this article we will cover the differences between VMware ESXi, vSphere and vCenter while also explain the features supported by each vSphere edition: vSphere Standard, Enterprise plus and Plantium edition. We will touch on the differences and limitations between VMware Workstation Player and VMware Workstation Pro, and also compare them with EXSi Free and EXSi Paid editions.
Finally we will demystify the role of vCenter and the additional features it provides to a VMware infrastructure.
So, without any further delay, let’s take a look at the topics covered:
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It’s sometimes difficult to keep up to date with the latest names of software. Even the largest technology vendors change their product names from time to time. Unfortunately, getting the product name wrong can result in various costly consequences including purchasing the wrong product or an older version with differentiating feature sets.
Contrary to popular belief, vSphere and vCenter are actually different products:
Looking at the vSphere suite, the components and features that vSphere includes depend on your licenses. vCenter Server is available on all vSphere editions.
Here is an overview of some features for the main vSphere editions:
You will notice that this vSphere feature table contains many different technologies which are found in different VMware software components.
vCenter is a management tool that helps manage multiple ESXi / vSphere Hypervisors within the datacentre. Earlier versions of vCenter (also known as vCenter Server) ran exclusively on Windows Server (shown in the previous diagram) whereas now VMware now offers the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) which runs on either SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 64-bit (vCSA v6.0) or VMware’s proprietary Photon OS (vCSA v6.5 and above).
You log in to vCenter Server via an HTML5 browser (formally a Flash client) which looks like this: