The Fastest Route to SASE | McAfee Blogs

Shortcuts aren’t always the fastest or safest route from Point A to Point B. Providing faster “direct to cloud” access for your users to critical applications and cloud services can certainly improve productivity and reduce costs, but cutting corners on security can come with huge consequences. The Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework shows how to achieve digital transformation without compromising security, but organizations still face a number of difficult choices in how they go about it. Now, McAfee can help your organization take the shortest, fastest, and most secure path to SASE with its MVISION Unified Cloud Edge solution delivered alongside SD-WAN.

Decision makers seek a faster, more efficient high road to cloud and network transformation without compromising security. The need for speed and scalability is crucial, but corners cannot be cut when it comes to maintaining data and threat protection. Safety and security cannot be left behind in a cloud of transformation dust. This blog will look at the major trends driving SASE adoption, and will then discuss how a complete SASE deployment can deliver improved performance, superior threat & data security, lower complexity, and cost savings. We’ll then explain why fast AND secure cloud transformation requires an intelligent, hyperscale platform to accelerate SASE adoption.

Dangerous Detours, Potholes, and Roadblocks

While digital transformation promises substantial gains in productivity and efficiencies, the journey is littered with security and efficiency challenges that can detour your organization from its desired upgrades and safe destination.

Digital transformation challenges that must be addressed include:

• The Big Shift – Shifting your organization’s applications and data out of corporate data centers and into the cloud.
• Going More Mobile – The proliferation of mobile devices leaves your corporate resources more vulnerable as they are being accessed by a growing number of devices many of which are personally owned and unmanaged.
• Work from Anywhere– The seemingly permanent shift towards “Work from Home” creates an increased demand for more efficient distributed access to cloud-based corporate resources that secures visibility and control amidst the eroding traditional network.
• Costly Infrastructure – MPLS connections, VPN concentrators, and huge centralized network security infrastructure represent major investments with significant operational expense. The fact that multiple security solutions typically operate in distinct siloes compounds management effort and costs.
• Slow Performance, High Latency, and Low Productivity – Dedicated MPLS and VPN lines are also slow and architecturally inefficient, requiring all traffic to go to the data center for security and then all the way back out to internet resources – NOT a straight line.
• Data Vulnerability – Data resides and moves completely outside the scope of perimeter security through collaboration from the cloud to third parties, between cloud services, and access by unmanaged devices, leaving it prone to incidents without security teams knowing.
• Evolving Threats and Techniques – Staying ahead of the latest malware remains a priority, but many modern attacks are emerging that use techniques like social engineering to exploit the features of cloud providers and mimic user behavior with legitimate credentials. Detecting these seemingly legitimate behaviors is extremely difficult for traditional security tools.

Feel the Need for Safe, But Less Costly Speed

The increasingly difficult challenge of providing a fast and safe cloud environment to an increasingly distributed workforce has become a major detour in the drive to transform from traditional enterprise networks and local data centers. Companies have had to meet the challenge to “adapt or die” in connecting their employees and devices to corporate resources, but many have generally needed to choose between two unsatisfactory compromises: secure but slow and expensive, or fast and affordable but not secure. Adopting a SASE framework is the way to achieve all of the benefits of cloud transformation without compromise:

• Reduction in Cost and Complexity – A great benefit for your SOC and IT teams, SASE promotes a network transformation that simplifies your technology stack, reducing costs and complexity.
• Increased Speed and Productivity – Fast, uninterrupted access to applications and data boosts the user experience and improves productivity. SASE provides ubiquitous, low-latency connectivity for your workforce – even remote workers – via a fast and ubiquitous cloud service, and uses a streamlined “single pass” inspection model that ensures they aren’t bogged down by security.
• Multi-Vector Data Protection – SASE mandates the protection of data traveling through the internet, within the cloud, and moving cloud to cloud, enabling Zero Trust policy decisions at every control point.
• Comprehensive Threat Defense – A SASE framework fortifies an organization’s threat defense capabilities for detecting both cloud-native and advanced malware attacks within the cloud and from any web destination.

Selecting the Best Path to Transformation

When network and security decision makers come to the proverbial fork in the road to network transformation, what is the best path that enables fast and affordable access without leading to unacceptable security risk? A recent blog by McAfee detailed four architectural approaches based on the willingness to embrace new technologies and bring them together. After examining the pros and cons of these four paths, the ideal solution to achieve fast, secure, and cost-effective access to web and cloud resources is a SASE model that brings together a ubiquitous, tightly integrated security stack with a robust, direct-to-cloud SD-WAN integrated networking solution. This combination provides a secure network express lane to the cloud, cruising around the latency challenges of slow, expensive MPLS links for connectivity to your applications and resources.

MVISION Unified Cloud Edge (UCE) + SD-WAN: Fast, Furious and Secure

Fast Network. Data Protection. Threat Protection. Speed, security and safety turbocharged connectivity throughout a hyperscale cloud network without compromise.

MVISION UCE is the best framework for implementing a SASE architecture to accelerate digital transformation with cloud services, enabling cloud and internet access from any device while empowering ultimate workforce productivity. MVISION UCE brings SASE’s most important security technologies – Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Next-gen Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) – together in a single cloud-native hyperscale service edge that delivers single-pass security inspection with ultra-low latency and 99.999% availability.

With MVISION Unified Cloud Edge and our SD-WAN integration partners, you can lead a network transformation that reduces costs and speeds up the user experience by using fast, affordable broadband connections instead of expensive MPLS.

MVISION UCE and SD-WAN transforms your network architecture by enabling users to directly access cloud resources without having to go back through their corporate network through MLPS or VPN connection. Now users can directly access cloud resources, and the McAfee cloud infrastructure is so well-optimized that they can often access resources even FASTER than if there was no intervening security stack! Read how Peering POPs make negative latency possible in this McAfee White Paper.

Because of the way we’ve delivered our product, MVISION UCE + SD-WAN unleashes SASE’s benefits, with data and threat protection that other vendors can’t match.

Reduction in Cost and Complexity, Increased Speed and Agility

• The resulting converged cloud service is substantially more efficient than building your own SASE by manually integrating separate cloud-based technologies
• Minimize inefficient traffic backhauling with intelligent, efficient, and secure direct-to-cloud access
• Protect remote sites via SD-WAN using industry standard Dynamic IPSec and GRE protocols leveraging SD-WAN technology that gets office sites to cloud resources faster and more directly than ever before
• Enjoy low latency and unlimited scalability with a global cloud footprint and cloud-native architecture that includes global Peering POPs (Point of Presence) reducing delays
• As a cloud service with 99.999% uptime (Maintained Service Availability) and internet speeds faster than a direct connection, you improve the productivity of your workforce while reducing the cost of your network infrastructure.

Multi-Vector Data Protection

• The McAfee approach to data protection is unified, meaning each control point works as part of a whole solution.
• All access points are covered using the same data loss prevention (DLP) engine, giving you an easily traceable path from device to cloud
• Your data classifications can be set once, and applied in policies that protect the endpoint, web traffic and any cloud interaction
• All incidents are centralized in one management console for a single view of your data protection practice, giving you a streamlined incident management experience

Comprehensive Threat Defense

• Intelligence-driven unified protection – CASB, Next-gen SWG, DLP – against the most sophisticated cyberattacks and data loss
• Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) protection from web-based threats and malware through the remote exclusion and containment of all browsing activities to a remote server hosted in the cloud
• The industry’s most effective in-line emulation sandbox, capable of removing zero-day malware at line speed
• User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) monitoring all cloud activity for anomalies and threats to your data

If you are looking for improved productivity and lower costs of cloud transformation without cutting corners, McAfee MVISION UCE offers the fastest route to SASE — without compromising your data and threat security.

Learn more about MVISION UCE and our unique approach to SASE here.