3. Pilot with Proof of Concept Before deploying SASE across the organization, it’s helpful to test the solution on a small-scale pilot with a limited number of sites, applications or users to ascertain whether the correct solution and approach has been selected. This proof of concept not only minimizes disruption but allows teams to showcase the outcomes and benefits of a SASE solution to key stakeholders. Whilst needs and benefits will vary from organization to organization, Xalient’s global research indicates that the top benefit, experienced by 30 percent of organizations, was improved performance of business-critical SaaS apps. This was followed by updated threat protection without hardware and software upgrades (28 percent), and the third most common benefit was around improved security surrounding breaches with consistent policies (27 percent). 4. Scaling Throughout the Organization Once the pilot phase is completed and validated, the next step is to scale the SASE solution across the organization. This requires a phased rollout to avoid disrupting operations and to balance the pace of change with operational risk. Implementing SASE broadly means expanding coverage to additional sites, applications and users, ensuring that policies are consistently applied across the entire infrastructure to ensure compliance is woven through every process. 5. Ongoing Management The final essential step all organizations must think about is that SASE is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Once deployed, the system requires ongoing monitoring, policy adjustments and lifecycle management to ensure that it continues to deliver value and maintains the flexibility to respond to any upcoming laws and regulations. IT teams must regularly assess network performance, security posture, and user experience. Through this, IT teams can ensure that their SASE investment remains relevant and effective in the long term. Taking an outcome-based approach to SASE implementation ensures that both business and IT security objectives are met, and that organizations can tackle current and future challenges with confidence. Additionally, by following a structured and phased deployment, organizations can derive maximum value from their SASE solutions, achieving improved security, better network performance and enhanced user experience. In today’s modern hybrid environment, SASE is the future of networking and security. It robustly converges network and security functions and security, and here at Xalient, we’re committed to helping businesses of all sizes take advantage of this powerful technology to improve their security posture, reduce complexity and increase scalability. o Stephen Amstutz is director of Innovation at Xalient. A recent study by ISC2 reveals that 73 percent of chief information security officers (CISOs) in the U.S. reported experiencing burnout during the past year. According to this “Voice of the CISO” report, 61 percent of CISOs said they face excessive expectations from their employers. Additionally, owing to the cybersecurity skills gap, many CISOs must continue to defend their companies with incredibly stretched resources and a mounting list of tasks that fall at the CISO’s feet. To add to this, growing regulation and legislation means cybersecurity leaders are becoming more concerned about personal liability, particularly since the criminal case against Uber Technologies’ former security chief. The new work from anywhere paradigm also adds to this complexity and has expanded the threat surface, as CISOs must ensure that remote employees can access their systems in the same way they would if they were in the office. Moe than ever, CISOs need vendors and partners they can trust and who can provide solutions to all these challenges. This is one of the reasons we are seeing a marked uptake in the adoption of SASE. In fact, according to its 2024 CIO and Technology Executive Survey, Gartner expects that 60 percent of enterprises will have clear-cut strategies to adopt SASE by 2025. Why is this the case? SASE creates a single network for all an organization’s data centers, offices and remote workers. It simplifies access rights by utilizing unique user identities and policy definitions. A secure network infrastructure typically requires multiple different solutions and can become unmanageable, due to significant administrative overhead which can result in poor performance. SASE provides robust security features in a simple package that doesn’t impact the speed of the network and is a natural progression of security for a workforce that’s ever more geographically distributed, where traditional network infrastructures struggle to manage increasing numbers of remote workers. From the security team’s perspective, key drivers for adoption that respondents from our research cited included secure remote access, fear of breach – including the regulatory, reputational and financial impacts – and the rising costs of traditional network infrastructure. While SASE certainly isn’t the silver bullet to alleviate all the pressures CISOs are under right now, it can help to overcome some of the stresses around skills, lack of resources, costs and performance while providing a more secure environment. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Gartner is predicting such impressive market adoption in 2025 and beyond. SASE and CISO Burnout 47 JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2025 | CHANNELVISION
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