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One thing that 2020 has taught us is that we need to be prepared for anything and everything that might be thrown at our businesses. Building an infrastructure for your staff and operations that is flexible enough to pivot on a dime, while secure enough to protect your business with confidence is paramount.
The great news is that there are affordable, scalable, secure and effective solutions that have come together recently as we’ve all moved to a cloud-first model of conducting business. No more sending your employees home to limp along on their cellphones while the office phones ring to voicemail. We all have (or should have) IP phones that let your employees answer work calls from anywhere, cloud-based data storage so that collaboration no longer relies on what we once called "sneaker-net", and a secure, convenient way to allow our team to access company data without exposing it through their home network.
One of these solutions we’ve had success offering is called SASE, or Secure Access Service Edge. A fancy way of saying that there are about 10 different security solutions that are bundled together, easy to deploy, and costs less than you’d think. The SASE security model can help your organization in several ways:
Flexibility: With a cloud-based infrastructure, you can implement and deliver security services such as threat prevention, web filtering, sandboxing, DNS security, credential theft prevention, data loss prevention and next-generation firewall policies.
Cost savings: Instead of buying and managing multiple point products, utilizing a single platform will dramatically reduce your costs and IT resources.
Reduced complexity: You can simplify your IT infrastructure by minimizing the number of security products your IT team has to manage, update and maintain, consolidating your security stack into a cloud-based network security service model.
Increased performance: With a cloud infrastructure, you can easily connect to wherever resources are located. Access to apps, the internet and corporate data is available globally.
Zero Trust: A Zero Trust approach to the cloud removes trust assumptions when users, devices and applications connect. A SASE solution will provide complete session protection, regardless of whether a user is on or off the corporate network.
Threat prevention: With full content inspection integrated into a SASE solution, you benefit from more security and visibility into your network.
Data protection: Implementing data protection policies within a SASE framework helps prevent unauthorized access and abuse of sensitive data. (Palo Alto Networks)
No matter how or where your staff connects, you can make sure that every person and every device is as secure, if not more secure than as if they were sitting in the office. 4G, 5G, Wifi, Ethernet, Hotel, Hotspot, Co-Working, Coffee Shop, Laptop, Park, Desktop, Friend’s house, Phone, Tablet, Parent’s Basement, Bluetooth, on a beach, or even in the office. Every staff, every device, every server can now be secured using a cloud-first secure global network using this new approach.
No more fighting with the VPN. No more failed logins. No more confusion and user resistance. Now you can control what resources are being accessed, by whom, and when. You can secure your company laptops, cellphones, desktops...even the printers!
Welcome to the work from anywhere economy. Businesses that embrace it have a true competitive advantage.
Check out these resources for more information: