Network security or performance, too often a choice in SASE services today

Network security or performance, too often a choice in SASE services today

Cato Networks today announces the results of a major IT survey. The results show that respondents with SASE service answered almost the same as respondents without it, in terms of security and network performance.

A Cato Networks survey involved 2,045 IT professionals who were not customers of Cato Networks at the time of the study. This group was asked several questions related to a company’s security and network performance.

Minor differences

It was striking that respondents without Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) services gave almost identical answers to those with SASE services. Largely, they were convinced that it was not possible to choose both security and network performance. According to all respondents, a choice had to be made.

For the group without SASE, that is indeed the reality. That while SASE is often seen as a security and network performance solution, which does make the combination possible. The 8.5 percent of respondents who did have SASE services were clearly unaware of this.

Label SASE wrongly used

Cato Networks looks for the explanation in the types of SASE architectures currently available on the market. According to the company, a lot of vendors wrongly stick the SASE label on their products.

A SASE architecture should bring security and networking together in a cloud service, allowing companies to configure and manage both infrastructures from one place.

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Network security or performance, too often a choice in SASE services today

Hope it goes away

The results show that these so-called SASE architectures provide no benefits to users. For example, when asked how they respond to performance issues with cloud applications, the answer for 67% of SASE users and 61% of non-SASE users was that they would add bandwidth. In turn, 19% of SASE users and 21% of non-SASE users would purchase WAN optimization equipment. 14 percent of SASE users did not even know how to solve these problems at all. Answers in this group ranged from “Ignore the problem and hope it goes away.” to “Wait for it to go away -ugh.”

On security, for example, they were asked how they rated their own skills in detecting malware and responding to an attack. SASE users gave themselves an underwhelming rating of four on a scale of one to 10. The remaining respondents were at a three.