Effective Adoption of SASE in 2021

Think back to mid-2019: People had already been moving to the cloud, having talked about digital transformation for years. Then, March 2020 shoved transformation into hyperdrive: Suddenly, there was a mass exodus from the office, and everybody was working from home. That’s when the old ways of doing things collapsed as people realized that those old ways were not only slow and painful; they were also expensive, according to Jim Fulton, director of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Zero Trust solutions at Forcepoint.

Jim Fulton is Forcepoint’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, focused on Data-first SASE and Zero Trust Data Protection solutions. He has been delivering enterprise access and security products for more than 20 years and holds a degree in Computer Science from MIT.

In this Threatpost podcast, Fulton discusses how the surge of remote work in 2020 caused organizations to explore SASE: a better way to manage both remote workers, the web and the cloud than what had been common practice before March 2020.

“The old approaches of requiring people to connect back to a home office in order to get security or in order to access applications and data, or even in many cases, the people would be using a VPN to connect into a home office and then having itgo through various gateways and things like that, going right back out to the internet and back up into the cloud – the short version is, everyone came to realize that’s really expensive,” he said. “It’s really slow. And it’s really painful, especially for users.”

Hosted by Threatpost host Cody Hackett, Forcepoint’s Fulton discusses how people realized that moving infrastructure to the cloud “not only makes sense, but in fact, it’s the only way to really manage people working remote.” It makes more sense than ever to use SASE to manage everything now in the cloud, and to use zero trust to control network access to applications that are now spread around the cloud or around data centers.

Listen to the full podcast below or download directly here.