Video: Why SASE?

In this video, Stuart Couchman, CEO of Enablis explains why you should consider SASE to both improve your overall user experience, and increase your cyber security.



Setup a call with Stuart

Please submit this form, if you would like to setup a call with Stuart.





VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

So why SASE? Just briefly, and I've done the very short version of this. You'd be happy to know.

Look. A lot of customers are still or a lot of companies are still sitting with this old, I guess, castle and moat type approach to security, which I shouldn't need to convince anyone. But more practically, what's happening is if users are in the office, they're probably reasonably secure. But when users are at home, a lot of them aren't even VPNing in, which really means it's your antivirus versus the Internet, which just isn't good enough today.

The second thing, which is, I guess, when you're looking to mature your environment, the vast majority of companies aren't decrypting traffic, which means you're basically missing eighty to ninety percent of what's going on in your network. So bit of a cheeky, cartoon, but probably gives you a very good idea that, you know, most things are just walking straight through all your existing controls.

The third area is obviously zero trust, which unfortunately, you know, I think is getting up there with cloud in terms of overuse in the market, but it is a very important principle to put in place. So what we wanna be doing is that no matter where users are, absolutely everything they do is inspected before it goes anywhere near your data. And that that's really the the simple version of zero trust. And then the fourth bit is, again, just looking at building, I guess, capability is data protection.

So, you know, how mature is that in your business? Can you actually stop PII or whatever it is that's important to you leaving your environment? Would you even be aware if if you are?

So those kind of challenges together, we need to secure the end user. We need to implement zero trust. We need to look at all the traffic, and then we need to make sure we've got the controls in place to manage your data.

So the way we tackle this, with our customers is in a four part conversation. So network connectivity is obviously still important. If you can't get on the Internet, you can't do anything. The next bit is then SD WAN, which is, I guess, more taking care of your offices.

The third part of it is security as a service. So effectively taking all the capability of your firewall and all the other tools, but delivering it as a single platform in the cloud. And then the fourth and probably most important that is actually the application or the experience management for end users. Because we can do all the connectivity and security, but if the end users aren't happy, then that's ultimately what we're judged on.

So the first building block is connectivity. So what we would do, and Paul touched on is, you know, our model is a VNO model. So we can use any carrier in the market to basically look at each of your offices individually and then make the choice based on technology and prices to what's most appropriate.

But what I just wanted to touch on today, is, I guess, a bit of a well, it's quite a significant change in the industry again. I'm sure you've all had a huge amount of exposure to NBN. You've probably got it at home.

But interesting announcement or I guess progression came out in the last few months. The NBN have been given another large, grant from the government that is gonna basically enable them to build out their fiber footprint to seventy percent of the homes and businesses in Australia, which is great news for all of us. You know, the kids will be able to stream Netflix and play Xbox, quicker, more consistently. But more importantly from our point of view, and I guess yours, this is really changing the way we look at our customers' networks. And I guess two things is that, you know, your traditional cheaper telecom services, you know, going back to ADSL, they really would only work for kind of three or five users, maybe a few more.

Whereas where we're getting to now on NBN, you know, you can have a gig down and I can't remember the exact plane, plenty, plenty up. But still on effectively a product that is priced nearer the consumer price point.

The other important change that's happened is on those, I guess, they they are business products, but I'd say commercially, they're leaning that way. They actually have a four hour SLA as well because that's where we've gone with our customers. It's kinda been, you know, are you happy not to have an SLA at your smaller sites, or do you wanna spend more on, I guess, enterprise grade telco? So those lines are now fully blurred.

So this is this is quite an exciting change. But where where we're seeing this play out is that this should allow you just to take bandwidth off the table. You know, give your users as much bandwidth as they need at all the sites. Don't that shouldn't be a conversation.

But also what'll hopefully help you do is actually free up some of your budget that you can then spend on cyber because, unfortunately, cyber is not cheap. But if you can massage your budget, then, know, that that really helps. So we can maybe touch on that. We've got a few of our colleagues from NBN on the call if there's any any deeper questions later in the session.

The second part, and I won't go into this today, I'm sure you've all been, heard plenty about SD WAN, is really just putting the network connectivity in place. The one thing I'll just call out is this is fully integrated with the security platform. So it's not it's not that you've got two separate vendors, which is really, really important.

The third piece is obviously the security as a service. So what we're doing there is no matter where user, works from so I might be at home. I just open the lid on my laptop. I do one login, and I'm securely connected. If I'm in the office, it's exactly same if I'm in a hotel. So your user always connected to this platform, so there's no way around it. And then what we're doing is we're looking at who the user is, who the device is, what app they're trying to access, and then overlaying all of the security controls.

But what what this looks like at a more practical level is, you know, we're gonna first validate the user is who they say they are. We're then gonna look at their device. You know, does it have the right certificates on it, antivirus patch levels? We're then gonna enforce access controls.

So is the user allowed to access whatever the application or data might be? And then fourthly, we're actually gonna scan all of the content going back some forwards from that user. And only if all of those are green will we allow them access. And if at any point one of those, while they connect to change, we'll disconnect them automatically.

So you've got very tight controls around your environment.

The fourth pillar is, digital digital experience management. And that this is, I guess yeah. I I grew up in the the late nineties, early two thousands of help desk life, and it was very difficult. I mean, you and I don't think we've progressed that far.

Your option was reboot your laptop, maybe reboot your modem, and there wasn't a lot else you could do. Where we've got to today is that we can see absolutely every single element of the user's experience. Experience. So from the actual laptop, the CPU, the memory, their home Wi Fi is the signal strong, their home broadband, all the way through to the actual application that they're using.

So this really gives your support desk or your managed service provider, whoever's supporting your environment, the the information to really help users resolve problems.

Just so that I won't do too many screenshots, but this is the snapshot that you basically get of your environment so that you can see if there are any issues. These bubbles would go orange, and then you can just click into it and see exactly what the particular issue is.

The same across your applications that, you know, at any time, you can pull a snapshot up, and it'll show you from your user's perspective how your applications are performing.