Increasingly Complex and Heterogeneous Enterprise Infrastructures Drive Demand for SASE and SSE – Yuval Yatskan, Cisco
By Lane F. Cooper, Editorial Director, BizTechReports
Cloud migration and on-prem modernization initiatives have fundamentally changed how enterprise IT and security teams assess threats and manage risks to protect mission-critical assets. As a result, organizations across industries and geographies are expressing growing interest in the role that Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Security Service Edge (SSE) technologies play in managing risks associated with today’s complex hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures.
Listen to the entire audio interview with Cisco’s Yuval Yatskan by clicking here.
So says Yuval Yatskan, Cisco’s senior director of solutions and product marketing for SSE, SASE, Cloud and Network Security, in a podcast interview for journalists.
“Compared to legacy architectures, today’s hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures are much more complex and consequently harder to protect. On average, organizations globally are experiencing over 1,200 weekly attacks and it takes as many as 287 days to discover and contain these breaches. With the average cost of a data breach now estimated at $4.5 million, much is at stake,” explains Yatskan.
As a result, organizations are looking for ways to deliver – and protect – a consistent and seamless user experience regardless of where people work, what apps and resources they access, and what devices they use, whether managed or unmanaged.
"SASE is really about the convergence of networking and security and offers a path to optimize and simplify both security and connectivity, viewing them both as two sides of the same coin. with the complexity of hybrid and multi cloud environments outpacing both human scale and skills, such simplification and convergence are key”, he says.
Convergence Through Abstraction
The groundwork for SASE and SSE has been laid by over a decade of development and innovation that has taken place in rolling out software-defined networks (SDNs) and other abstracted infrastructure elements.
The emergence of intelligent software-defined infrastructures is changing the way enterprise leaders think about protecting their most important assets and resources. Until now, many, if not most, organizations have identified threats and vulnerabilities and then selected point solutions to address them. While each point solution may effectively address the problem it was designed for, this standard operating procedure created further fragmentation and silos among these solutions, exacerbating the complexity of an already complex hybrid and multi cloud environment, and introducing new gaps, blind spots and vulnerabilities.
“Industry research suggests that, on average, companies deploy 76 security vendors across their technology stack to address enterprise-wide security challenges and risks. At first glance, it is easy to see how we got there. A new risk or challenge manifests itself, and multiple vendors jump on the solution. In many cases, the solutions are actually pretty good. But taken to its natural conclusion, it really is beyond me to even imagine how they can manage all these independent solutions effectively,” Yatskan says.
Automation is the Path Through the Talent Crunch
With unemployment rates at – or near – historical lows, talent is simply unavailable for strategies that throw humans at complex IT management and security mitigation challenges.
“Two things happen when organizations consolidate their control plane. First, they can train people to have a vaster vantage point, be more effective, and perform a greater variety of tasks on common platforms. Second, they can leverage network and security intelligence to capture insights across platforms to prioritize and focus on what matters most. This will be critical to avoiding burnout and retaining and developing talent, which is what is taking place as staff scurry in response to alarms generated by disparate and unintegrated point security solutions across the enterprise,” concludes Yatskan.
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EDITORIAL NOTE: Listen to the entire audio interview with Cisco’s Yuval Yatskan by clicking here.