Overcoming SASE Challenges: Dell Oro’s 2024 White Paper Unveils 4 Key Hurdles to Clear

By Ryan Livesay | January 4, 2024

More and more customers are going down the SASE journey in 2024 and so over the holiday period, I did some reading and came across this really informative white paper. Published by Dell’Oro, it encapsulates every problem I heard from prospects and partners throughout 2023 and it highlights 4 common challenges to watch out for. Whether thinking about implementing SASE or if you are already on the journey, I would be interested to hear if these challenges resonate with you and more importantly, are there other challenges to watch out for, not mentioned below? So, let’s review these common challenges:

Problem # 1: Over emphasis on security at the expense of networking – we all agree that security is critical; it is non-negotiable. However, performance is as well, and many companies find it hard to balance both. As one layers in more security, this can come at a cost and so a foundational requirement for a successful SASE solution is a high performant SD-WAN solution. This must come first and the better network solution you have, the more security you can layer in to protect your applications.

Problem # 2: Lack of integration between security and networking functionality – buying best of breed is a commonly accepted approach, like best of breed SWG, CASB, DLP, NGFW, etc.. This will get you the right standalone functionality, however stitching together solutions from different vendors will come at a cost – a people cost, a time cost, a performance cost. Integrating best of breed solutions costs more than you think, and most importantly, it slows you down. Integrated solutions work better – they are faster, cheaper and they enable your business to be more agile.

Problem # 3: Too much focus on the last mile – not enough focus on the middle mile and multi-cloud compute edges. The starting position is always the end user. Security for the end user is important but so is securing the application at the cloud edge. The closer security is to the application, the less risk of having someone compromise the application. Therefore, what happens in the middle mile and what happens at the cloud edge matters. It is like locking your door but keeping the windows open. Security risks are minimized when you protect all three areas equally.

Problem # 4: Challenged network and security workflows – what is meant by this? Your end goal is to configure and deploy fast. To ensure policies are easily changed and maintained. Administrators want to scale fast – new employees, new locations, new business needs. Scale up and down as the business demands. The more complex policy management is, the harder this goal is. Also, the more solutions and the more dashboards you deal with, the more complex everything is. The end result is increased complexity for administrators and operators alike.

In order to help make your SASE Journey in 2024 more simple and more successful, I suggest we look at overcoming these 4 common challenges. Did I miss any? Are there more out there? Or do these 4 common challenges address the bulk of the challenges faced by organizations who are trying to improve their networking and security postures by implementing SASE?

Finally, this white paper has much more valuable content and so if these challenges resonate with you and you want to learn more, then reach out to us. Looking forward to your thoughts and feedback.

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