Ep. 37 Living on the Edge . . . The Secure Access Service Edge

December 1, 2022

There was a time in American culture when “living on the edge” was a social construct. Perhaps a person was a test pilot or motorcycle racer. In terms of federal information technology, we all live on the edge.

The edge referred to is, of course, the digital edge. The wall protecting federal data has long been breached and technologies like Zero Trust are being implemented to protect vital assets.

The term Secure Access Service Edge was coined by Gartner in 2019. It was a stodgy concept at the time and then COVID hit. The millions of remote sessions were causing technology leaders to evaluate the way they handled security. Suddenly, the acronym SASE was born, along with its unique pronunciation: “Sassy.”

During the interview, Dr. Tim Robinson from WWT gives a detailed description of SASE. He is uniquely qualified to speak to the federal audience because he was a Marine and has worked his way up to a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

"Because when you look at identity of people and their access management, you want to make sure the right people have the right access to that to that data"

Dr. Tim Robinson, WWT Tweet

A rough description may be cloud technology is being leveraged to optimize network connectivity to allow for consistent policy enforcement, centralized visibility, and scalability.

It is always good to look at an emergency and, later, do a course correction. An argument can be made that COVID forced technology leaders to use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). After all, they were available and easy to deploy.

In hindsight, most can conclude that the VPN has strategic weaknesses. It is simply not optimized for the cloud.

Listen to the interview to get an expert’s view on ways to increase security and reduce costs to protect federal data.

If you enjoyed this article, you may want to listen to episode #30 How to Outwit the Problem of Federal Identity