Radically Enhancing SASE Orchestration through Consolidation and Automation
While SASE delivers huge benefits, many IT teams often struggle with poor consolidation, automation, and app classification capabilities, fueling team-wide frustration and increasing time-consuming manual labor.
While SASE delivers tremendous benefits, many IT teams are perplexed by SASE orchestration issues. As you navigate the veritable sea of SASE vendors, what is the secret to finding an orchestrator solution that’s affordable, efficient, and user-friendly? Here’s what Abe Ankumah, VP of Product, VMware, has to say.
SASE’s soaring popularity has spurred widespread deployments across the enterprise landscape, from branch offices to remote workers and beyond. In fact, 90% of enterprises either deploy SASE or plan to launch it soon.
While SASE delivers huge benefits, many IT teams often struggle with poor consolidation, automation, and app classification capabilities, fueling team-wide frustration and increasing time-consuming manual labor. This delivers an inconsistent and jarring user experience, reducing the orchestration platform’s value.
That experience runs contrary to many IT teams’ goal of simplifying their network and consolidating control in the wake of reduced resources. Recently, over 60% of IT teams faced decreased budgets, with more than 70% reporting that 10% or less of the corporate’s overall budget was reserved for IT.
As you navigate the veritable sea of SASE vendors, what is the secret to finding an orchestrator solution that’s affordable, efficient, and user-friendly? Here is a checklist of key capabilities to look for.
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Consolidation Powers a User-friendly Experience
Remember when you used multiple remote controls and weren’t sure which operated the TV, cable, VCR, and DVD player? That unorchestrated solution led to a poor entertainment experience because of the time required to switch something on!
Much like leveraging multiple TV remotes, a disjointed SASE orchestration solution causes a poor user and security experience, requiring IT teams to maintain various touchpoints.
For example, one SASE vendor requires users to leverage six different login screens to manage capabilities ranging from SD-WAN to AIOps to cloud web security. Who wants to spin all those plates? Even worse, the vendor’s six business units produced their portals, creating disparate products that lengthen the user’s learning curve.
Additionally, another vendor’s SASE orchestrator solution sprawls similar capabilities across different management platforms, making it challenging and time-consuming to manage.
But not all SASE orchestrators are created equally.
The best orchestrators provide a single entry point into their solution, collapsing all the manual work into a single converged platform that eliminates complexities and produces an experience that’s seamless, easy to use, and comfortable — requiring very little system upkeep across your team.
For example, if you’re trying to launch a security policy, an ideal orchestrator leverages automation to distribute it across your network — producing a fantastic user experience.
Automation Streamlines Operations and Slashes TCO
Unfortunately, some SASE vendors make the policy deployment process difficult. For instance, here are some hoops one vendor makes you jump through:
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- Access their SD-WAN orchestrator
- Create several feature templates and bind those feature templates to device templates
- Build a tunnel to their cloud-based Internet gateway platform and ensure it works
- Use their gateway platform to write all your policies
- Apply your policies to specific tunnels (requiring significant configuration work)
And even after executing those sluggish steps, there’s no guarantee that your security policy was applied correctly across current and new sites.
To circumvent that arduous 5-step process, find a SASE vendor whose orchestrator harnesses the power of automation and spans:
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- Business policy automation
- Device configuration automation
- Security policy automation
- Automated security policy enforcement
This simplifies and streamlines your day zero to day two operations — alleviating your installation, deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting challenges in support of the branch and mobile users.
How does this reduce your TCO? After you define your policies, software updates for every device across your network are easily automated in just a few clicks. How would this look? Let’s say you receive a threat alert and need to isolate infected hosts on the network. By leveraging your converged orchestrator, once you update your policy, the solution will automatically enforce this policy change in an agile manner without any added operator intervention.
This automation eliminates the hours and multiple maintenance windows you would have normally encountered from an operational overhead perspective. As a result, you can reallocate resources towards more business impactful work instead of performing day-to-day maintenance and keeping the lights on.
App Classification Reduces Workloads — and Rework
Launching and managing SASE shouldn’t feel like pulling teeth — it should be seamless and painless. So why do some SASE vendors stumble there? While they can identify the apps and steer your traffic, your team must do most of the heavy lifting — such as matching their apps with specific SLAs and building a forward error correction policy around that.
And many SASE solutions that claim to have SD-WAN don’t provide smart defaults for protecting the thousands of apps on your network. Instead, it requires administrators to know every app on their company’s network and create an SLA policy for them individually, a game of whack-a-mole that is time-consuming and error-prone.
Additionally, they must do significant configuration work right out of the box to ensure your orchestrator works correctly.
Beyond that, there’s potential rework involved because they cannot guarantee all user devices are using the same policy, which forces them to investigate far more cases. For example, if your team receives reports from a branch office whose users complain of a slow-running app, your team must look into it. And if they learn that it’s due to a misconfiguration they wrote, they must reconfigure it to solve the problem, spending time on a task that should have been handled on the day the app deployed.
Instead, find a vendor who goes the extra mile for you by classifying thousands of apps and building software-defined policies around them by applying industry best practices to ensure they get the performance SLAs they deserve. This gives your team a holistic, top-down view across your entire app landscape, enabling them to make adjustments instantly and reduce work hours to mere minutes.
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Building SASE Success
From driving consolidation to powering automation to enabling classification, a converged, user-friendly, cost-effective SASE orchestrator eliminates numerous logistical complexities for IT teams – increasing their bandwidth to innovate new projects. Finding a SASE vendor who excels in orchestration will eliminate productivity-killing roadblocks for your team, forging a path forward to improve network management and security across your enterprise.
How are you battling your SASE roadblocks? Tell us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We’d love to know!
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