THE COMPONENTS OF SASE

Every piece of the SASE framework matters.

SOFTWARE DEFINED (SD-WAN)

The uptick in cloud usage has led businesses to increasingly rely on new network connections to stay online. SD-WAN enables organizations to use multiple external network connections — including MPLS, broadband, and fiber optic — based on admin rules or best performance at the time.

What does this mean for your business? Here’s what SD-WAN can do for you:

Connect onsite or remote users to cloud and legacy applications easily and securely
Provide connectivity and an intelligent routes to applications, no matter where they reside
Prioritize and segment network traffic for increased security and performance
Fully integrate with Cisco Umbrella for additional layers of security

What’s different about Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki?

It’s the simplest SD-WAN available. True zero touch provisioning creates a fast, simple route to reducing your organization’s WAN costs and delivering high performance for cloud applications—wherever they’re hosted.
It comes with native security. Advanced features such as next-gen layer-7 firewall and Cisco Umbrella SIG give you the confidence to allow direct internet access confidently.
It streamlines your IT operations. The unified management platform provides control over SD-WAN, as well as wireless, switching, cellular, and endpoint management—all in a single, intuitive application.

CLOUD SECURITY

(with Cisco Umbrella)

SASE’s value depends on its security. To ensure your environment is secure, you’ll need protection for every user in every location — as well as the ability to scale and manage that protection across your network.

That might sound like an impossible task, but it isn’t.

Cisco Umbrella is a cloud-native security service that unifies a variety of leading networking and security solutions into a single platform. Those solutions include:

CASB
Secure Web Gateway
Cloud Delivered Firewall

It integrates with every WAN edge device, making it simple to connect users at home, in the office, and beyond. Ultimately, Cisco Umbrella is uniquely:

Simple. Umbrella is easily licensed and can be combined with SD-WAN licensing, deploys quickly at scale, and effortlessly integrates with SD-WAN, Meraki management, and other existing security tools.
Secure. It provides DNS-layer security, web inspection, and sandboxing. New features include remote browser isolation and data loss prevention (DLP).
Scalable. With over 1,000 peering partners and global cloud architecture, it enables the fastest route to and from SaaS apps — meeting demand at scale with seed and low latency.

Let SHI walk you through a comprehensive demo of Cisco Umbrella. Our Cisco experts will show you how a highly secure internet gateway in the cloud works in your environment.

ZERO TRUST ACCESS

(Starts with Duo)

Don’t depend on trust for your security systems. Instead, rely on verification of workloads, workplaces, and the workforce — especially since users are connecting on multiple devices and in various locations.

Duo’s Zero Trust framework lives up to its name by ensuring secure access to applications only after validating established risk criteria, such as:

Is the user who they say they are? Multi-factor authentication eliminates the threat of attacks that come from compromised credentials with minimal disruption of workflow.
Is the device secure? Duo endpoint visibility provides an overall view of a device’s security status and flags risky devices for administrators.
Does the user have access to the right apps? Admins can set role-based access controls based on user roles and responsibilities, ensuring applications are only used by the appropriate people.

Seeing is believing. SHI’s security experts can demonstrate how Cisco Duo’s MFA adds a zero trust element to your specific environment.

OBSERVABILITY

(with Cisco ThousandEyes)

After you’ve built connectivity and security postures within your SASE architecture, you can turn your attention to user experiences. But you can’t understand — or improve — what you can’t see.

To improve user experiences, you must be able to observe your entire cloud environment: from your enterprise data center to SaaS applications.

Cisco ThousandEyes combines active and passive monitoring techniques with real-time internet outage detection to dive deep into user experiences across your organization’s applications and services.

By providing visibility across your entire enterprise, ThousandEyes helps you:

Deliver exceptional user experiences. Network and application synthetics, end user monitoring, and real-time outage data helps create dependable outcomes for customers and employees.
Reduce identification time. End-to-end visibility highlights problem areas, reducing the time to repair from hours to minutes.
Create a better working environment. Instant problem isolation saves time and eliminates finger-pointing.

SHI’s Network Observability Workshop provides a structured approach to understanding your environment and how deploying ThousandEyes converts data into the actionable insights you need.