The Evolution of the Enterprise WAN

Stakeholders in any technology space will always have one question in mind, What Next? The answer to this question is always bigger, faster, cheaper technology and even at times, eye-candy technology that could possibly be a simple improvement or re-tweak of preceding technological models. We expect to find this majorly in consumer electronics. The story for the enterprise grade technology solutions is different. Network technology to be specific, has undergone a slow but gradual process. Have in mind that enterprise grade technology is designed to function in high availability, and without fail, for years notwithstanding. This puts into perspective the enterprise technology journey. In the late 90s and early 2000s, MPLS emerged as a preferred candidate for enterprise connectivity. It provided benefits including predictable performance, low packet loss and latency and even centralized management. The draw back for the technology came with its high cost of use and implementation, alongside the huge amounts of time it takes to deploy and provision such links.
The alternative at the time was the use of internet circuits that were inexpensive, non-the less, low quality. This marked the first major need for network transformation. Additionally, consumer demands change rapidly. Demands for the Enterprise that meets such consumer needs will consequently have to evolve. The Enterprise WAN is no exception to this. It has seen its fair share of technological advancements, up to the precent day SASE. SASE, introduced by Gartner was a turning point for the network industry. SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge, and is the present-day buzzword, having taken the spot from SD-WAN. So, what is SASE and why SASE? This question is best answered through an in-depth analysis of SD-WAN. SD-WAN became popular and preferred because it provided enterprises with resilience and fault tolerance, security (through abstraction of underlay connectivity mediums) and cost reduction in their WAN connectivity. While these benefits stand out, it is critical to note that SDWAN is majorly a site-to-site connectivity. On the contrary, enterprise users heavily rely on cloud services as opposed to local hosting. In fact, most of these users will access these services over the public internet. Therefore, while SD-WAN was a step closer to where enterprises desired to be, it had its shortcomings. For example, as a site-to-site connectivity, the solution barely addressed the need for secure connections for a mobile workforce. Alone, it could not transform the WAN to meet the present demands of the modern-day enterprise. Then came SASE. SASE is a wholistic solution that incorporates SD-WAN. However, while SD-WAN is critical to SASE, it is not the only component. SASE delivers a single global backbone for the interconnection of all enterprise edges like cloud resources, sites and mobile devices. As part of its architecture, edges will make use of the local internet connections to relay their traffic to SLA backed Points of Presence (PoPs) that form part of the SASE global network. In these PoPs, the traffic will be secured, optimized and finally relayed to the intended destination.