VMware SASE and its key components

Secure access service edge (SASE) is a cloud-based enterprise security framework designed to address the network and security challenges caused by digital business transformation. The move to cloud coupled with the increasingly mobile workforce places users, devices, applications, and data outside of the enterprise data centre and network, creating an “access pattern inversion.” Introduced by Gartner, the SASE model responds to this inversion delivering networking and network security controls at the edge — as close to users as possible.

The VMware Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform consists of VMWARE SD-WAN (VeloCloud™), VMware Secure Access™ for remote users, Cloud Web Security™ and VMware Edge Network Intelligence™, which delivers flexibility, agility, security, and scale for enterprise of all sizes.

To roll out SASE in your business, you need to consider several performance pillars: 

App quality assurance for anyone, anywhere, anytime

VMware VeloCloud™ Dynamic Multi-path Optimization is comprised of automatic link monitoring, dynamic link steering and on-demand remediation. By integrating app recognition, traffic prioritization, and dynamic remediation with the means for measuring network path performance, SASE directs traffic on a packet-by-packet basis to provide a tremendous end-user experience. This distinct advantage ensures that users do not experience session timeout in the middle of a video call, call drops during a conversation or file sync failures on shared drives.

SD-WAN is the foundation of SASE. SD-WAN appliances deliver important networking functionality while SASE goes further by converging SD-WAN with other network and security services to create a holistic WAN connectivity and security fabric.

Layers of security while accessing internet

VMware CWS™ protects users and infrastructure against internal and external threats while accessing web applications. Providing visibility and control into SaaS applications, it detects and responds to threats in support of SaaS or web applications automatically.

VMware Cloud Web Security offers checks including URL Filtering, Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware (including file hash and full file inspection), and Sandbox. Policies can be configured for CASB and DLP. It is to make sure that an information system is not tampered by any unauthorised entities. VMware SASE platform is fully integrated with VMware UEM and EPP solutions.

Security intrinsic to the business process

VMware Secure Access™ is a remote access solution that is based on a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) framework. This is the assurance that information is not disclosed to unauthorised individuals, groups, processes, or devices. Only those who are authorised to view the information are allowed access.
VMware Secure Access also enables remote users to access cloud-based applications that are optimised for delivery and performance, leverages security and benefits of a cloud-hosted solution, and eases IT deployment and maintenance of costly remote access services.

User experience with AIOps

VMware ENI™ Edge Network Intelligence provides IT visibility into user experience for each application by leveraging artificial intelligence and big data analytics. The solution manages millions of end-user and IoT devices and helps shift the operating paradigm to a proactive mode. In this manner, it detects end devices, finds anomalies, determines root causes, and automatically remediates problems to enable self-healing. This significantly boosts end-users’ application quality of experience (QoS).

What’s the engine that powers VMWare SASE? It’s a global network of SASE points of presence that deliver these cloud services to users who work from anywhere (WFA). 150 points of presence (PoPs) — deployed by VMware and its SASE service provider partners — that could provide secure, consistent, and efficient app access from any location or device and allow new services and new users to be added or modified as needed. We now have VMware SASE PoP in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, and soon will open a new one in Auckland, NZ.

VMware SASE, as a SaaS solution, is easy to deploy. So please reach out to your VMware and service provider representative to get the latest data on VMware SASE and learn how you can seamlessly roll out this solution. There is no need to rush the implementation. You can always start with a slow, measured approach with some of the components (listed above), then use cloud agility to ramp up each of your projects and scale when needed.