In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses face numerous challenges when it comes to achieving seamless connectivity, optimizing their IT infrastructure, and staying ahead of the competition. Traditional hub-and-spoke or backhaul network architectures often struggle to keep up with the increasing demands placed on them by the adoption of cloud services, growing distributed workforces, and the need for robust disaster recovery capabilities.

For more than two decades, virtual private networks (VPNs) have been the go-to technology for enterprise remote access — and by extension, for enforcing remote access security. Even ubiquitous internet connections are often redirected via VPN to a central data center, where security enforcement occurs through various hardware appliances. From there, the traffic is forwarded onward to the internet. Of course, it must follow the same indirect path back on the response side.

SASE = SD-WAN + SSE. This simple equation has become a staple of SASE marketing and thought leadership. It identifies two elements that underpin SASE, namely the network access technology (SD-WAN) and secure internet access (Security Service Edge (SSE)). The problem with this equation is that it is simply wrong. Here is why. What is missing from the equation? The answer is: a cloud network.

I read with some surprise the interview with Zscaler’s CEO, Jay Chaudry, in CRN where he stated that the “network firewalls will go the way of the mainframe,” that “the network is just plumbing” and that Zscaler proxy overlay architecture will replace it with its “application switchboard.” Well, our joint history in network security teaches us a very different lesson. This is my take.