Securing users, devices and applications with security services that are distributed close to them eliminates a single point of failure and minimizes business performance impact. SSE solutions like zero trust network access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) help to protect against data breaches and other unauthorized activity.
Security & Access Control
The modern remote worker needs to be connected to company systems and applications but cannot take the risk of leaving sensitive data open to cyber attacks. SSE helps to overcome these challenges by enabling businesses to provide secure public cloud and web access for remote employees. It also provides critical threat detection and prevention capabilities, allowing organizations to safeguard their infrastructure from current and emerging threats.
Evaluating Security Subcontracting & Electronics solutions can be a challenging process for many companies. This buyers’ journey must take into account a range of factors including current investments, needs and ambitions for the future. Additionally, companies need to ensure that their chosen solution can meet and scale with traffic demands.
Lookout’s SSE Buyer’s Guide can help you navigate the process. We have compiled the best information from the industry to help you select and deploy the right SSE solution for your business. Learn more about the key benefits of SSE, including enhancing security posture at the edge, secure remote access and more.
When selecting a SSE vendor, choose one with comprehensive capabilities integrated into a single, easy-to-use platform. This can save time and effort by reducing complexity, reducing the number of management interfaces needed to manage, and providing a more holistic view of your entire network. It’s also essential to look for a solution that offers a wide variety of support availability, SLAs, professional and managed services options.
SSE solutions should be able to integrate with a wide variety of networking, security and cloud technologies, including SDN, NFV and SD-WAN. They should also have the capacity to scale with growing business demand, without impacting performance or latency. This scalability is especially important for SSE components like ZTNA, which is often more restrictive than the firewall ACLs it replaces.
Choose an SSE solution that supports a multi-mode approach for granular control over SaaS usage and application connectivity, with both CASB functionality and a zero trust network access (ZTNA) strategy. This can help to enable objectives like safely integrating the entrepreneurial ecosystem with enterprise apps, streamlining the cloud migration process and speeding up IT consolidation during M&A.
Security & Networking
A unified SSE platform can deliver several key security capabilities, including Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), cloud data loss prevention (DLP), and cloud security posture management (CSPM). Look for an SSE vendor that offers these capabilities in a single solution with a centralized policy engine that manages all protections. This reduces complexity, cost and risk.
SWG protects remote employees and business-critical systems from inherently unknown and risky web content by identifying the real location of users and devices and filtering out inappropriate, malicious or inadvertent information. It also provides security forces with a broader, more accurate view of endpoints and networks than traditional firewalls, reducing the need for complex and expensive integration projects.
Integrated SSE solutions can help businesses address some of their most challenging security challenges, including aligning implementation with business objectives, maintaining compliance, scaling to meet growth, addressing evolving threats and technologies, fostering security awareness, and selecting the right vendors. The best SSE providers offer a broad range of support availability, SLAs, professional and managed services options, and the ability to adapt their SSE capabilities to the unique needs of each business.
A unified security edge platform can support business objectives such as promoting hybrid work for mobile and remote workers, safely integrating the entrepreneurial ecosystem with private information, streamlining enterprise migrations to the cloud, and speeding up IT consolidation during M&A activities. In addition, an SSE framework can also quickly facilitate objectives like accelerating the delivery of cloud-based apps and services to customers, improving customer experience by eliminating network latency and bottlenecks, and lowering infrastructure costs through reduced IT expenses.
When choosing an SSE provider, ensure the system can offer scalable inline proxy inspection capacity. This capability is crucial for ensuring that the system can handle an enterprise’s traffic load without slowing down the user experience. Look for a system that uses a cloud-native architecture, which eliminates the need to backhaul traffic to the firewall or data center and helps to lower the cost of the deployment by enabling low-latency, high-performance networking and security performance.
Identity & Access Management
A comprehensive SSE solution combines zero trust network access (ZTNA), firewall-as-a-service, secure web gateway and cloud access security brokers to provide your organization with the full set of security technologies needed to support remote users. By eliminating the need to backhaul traffic across your enterprise network and enabling direct connections that require less inspection, SSE solutions deliver optimized and low-latency network performance while strengthening security and protection against external threats.
As the number of remote employees and contractors grows, it’s crucial for businesses to adopt comprehensive tools to ensure their data and infrastructure integrity is protected against internal threats. SSE enables businesses to strengthen their defenses against a variety of internal attacks, including disgruntled employees and misconfigured tools, with enhanced visibility and control.
An integrated SSE tool can also help organizations align their security measures with the dynamic and decentralized nature of business operations and workflows, enhancing agility and scalability. SSE enables organizations to implement acceptable use policies (AUPs) that clearly define how employees and contractors are expected to interact with company resources, helping to mitigate risks by eliminating unauthorized access.
SSE tools can also help to mitigate the risks of data loss and theft by implementing an identity-aware firewall that enforces least privilege access, continuously assesses traffic and protects against data loss and breaches. Additionally, SSE solutions can offer advanced capabilities such as dynamic threat analytics that automatically updates and prioritizes detection rules based on vulnerabilities, malware changes and attack trends.
In addition to these core SSE elements, some vendors will combine their solutions with a WAN edge infrastructure. While this can simplify operations by reducing the need for additional security vendor solutions, it may mean that you’re missing out on some of the more advanced SSE capabilities. For this reason, it’s critical to carefully evaluate your options before choosing a single-vendor approach.
Security Analytics
SSE providers monitor the threat landscape and deploy mitigations on behalf of their customers. This offloads this critical activity from your IT team and helps ensure users are protected against evolving threats before they cause business impact.
Streamlined Security and Networking Management
The centralized, cloud-delivered nature of SSE minimizes on-prem hardware deployments, reducing costs and operational overhead. It also allows organizations to scale their security measures with business growth and better align their implementations with the dynamic, decentralized nature of modern workplaces.
Improved Performance
Compared to traditional, layered security defense concepts and solutions like firewalls, IDS/IPS, endpoint and antivirus that are often siloed and lack visibility, SSE provides complete network and application security as a service. By delivering security services in the cloud, SSE solutions are distributed globally and provide optimized, low-latency network and security performance.
In addition, SSE delivers the functionality of SWG, CASB, ZTNA and cloud sandbox on one platform, making it easier for IT to integrate these technologies with their existing security infrastructure. Gartner also notes that unlike other layered security solutions, SSE platforms are not all-or-nothing—organizations can add technologies at their own pace to the platform without having to worry about compatibility issues.
Enables a Secure Remote Experience
SSE allows organizations to securely connect users, devices and applications using their own business policies over the internet, regardless of their location, connection or device type. This improves a user’s working experience, eliminates the need to backhaul data to headquarters for inspection and protects applications from attacks that could move laterally across the network.
SSE can also help reduce risks by enabling companies to enforce security at the edge rather than in their data centers, where attackers are more likely to find a way into internal systems and steal sensitive information. In addition, SSE can automatically patch software updates to limit the risk of unauthorized or malicious access and reduce the potential damage that results from data breaches and loss of control over enterprise systems. This helps to minimize the costs and repercussions of security breaches that can hurt a business’s reputation, damage its financial position or disrupt operations.
