A shift from data centres to the cloud has opened up a world of opportunity. It’s also made network security more complicated for most organisations.

New ways of accessing, moving and consuming data have increased the attack surface. The more strategies in play, the harder it is to keep all of them secure.

As network security evolves, some organisations are managing more vendors and an ever-growing suite of tools. When attacks come, it takes longer to find and fix the root cause.

The ongoing drive to achieve more — efficiency, speed, flexibility — means more transformation is on the cards. Yet another complication for organisations.

“Customers want a policy and a dashboard to combine everything together. They want to simplify their operations. That’s the number one question from our customers,” says Prasad Semrudkar, Cisco’s SASE Lead for Asia, Pacific, Japan and China.

While some vendors claim to have cracked the code, without the SD-WAN networking piece, it’s not a true SASE approach.

“Niche vendors are solving a particular piece of the puzzle. They may offer a single dashboard with a single policy. But if it doesn’t cover SD-WAN, then it’s not complete. There are still friction points to overcome to bring policy and implementation together. A single policy across everything in a single dashboard? We’re not quite there yet.”

It’s no surprise that no one has yet delivered a genuine unified security policy.

No map
With everyone doing SASE differently, there is no template or unified framework to follow; it’s fragmented by nature. This makes it difficult for vendors to develop a unified security policy that will work across all SASE settings.

Competing needs
Remote access versus remote edge, catering to users anywhere in the world while maintaining security at the edge (aka the office) demand very different approaches and policies.

UX push and pull
Then there’s the push and pull of SASE priorities. Should user experience come first as the focus of organisational policy settings? Should security still have the final say?

Market needs
Enterprise clients need highly customisable solutions that bring SecOps and NetOps together. Mid-market clients may suit a simpler, out-of-the-box solution.

Cisco has a track record delivering solutions across networking and security ops – harnessing its existing SD-WAN products in the enterprise and mid-market space as part of its goal to deliver on unified security policy. Cisco+ Secure Connect combines security and networking with a policy and dashboard. Paired with Cisco’s mid-market SD-WAN offering, Meraki, Secure Connect is designed be a single SaaS offer.