In many ways, the pandemic has only served to accelerate significant changes to enterprise IT architectures that were already starting to take hold. Many organizations were struggling to support more distributed environments due to the increasing use of public cloud services and a more mobile workforce well before March 2020. However, the pandemic certainly forced organizations to prioritize these issues and begin to consider more modern network and security solutions to better address the new normal.

The proliferation of applications in the cloud and dispersion of users from corporate locations has significantly complicated user security, access, and application performance. The emergence of secure access service edge (SASE) represents a modernization of security approaches to better address modern distributed environments through convergence with network services in a cloud-centric architecture. Through a unified approach to application delivery, secure access, and digital workspace, organizations can ensure quality of service and consistent security, and maintain efficient management for access across all types of applications for users regardless of location or device.