Before you start comparing SASE providers, it is very important to have a clear understanding of what SASE is. If you ask me to explain SASE in one line, I would say that,
“SASE is the convergence of networking and security functions into a cloud-delivered platform.”
I have had multiple discussions with experts in the field and also with my own colleagues at work. Everyone has a different understanding of what SASE is, but where we all converge is what SASE tries to achieve.
For me SASE is all about, “Leveraging the capabilities/functionalities of existing networking and security solutions to securely connect ‘n’ number of remote users (irrespective of where they are) to their applications, all sitting in the cloud.”
Or like how one of my colleagues who has more than 20 years of experience in the networking industry and a keen observer of SASE would put it, “SASE is being able to securely connect to an application, from anywhere”.
Gartner describes SASE as an identity- centric architecture that converges and inverts traditional datacenter-focused architectures. In other words, SASE combines network and security functionality in a model where user and resource identities, not physical data centers, are what determine access decisions.