What Are the Benefits Of SSE?

With a cloud-native, globally distributed architecture, SSE provides significant benefits over traditional appliance-based solutions. SSE (or Security Service Edge) refers to a limited scope of network security convergence, the combination of SWG, CASB / DLP and ZTNA, delivered as a single cloud-native service. SSE is a great step in the right direction towards Gartner’s ultimate vision of converged SASE (Secure Access Security Edge). Find out how enterprise IT can benefit from a converged SSE solution, from the right network security vendor. 

Consistent Security Policy Enforcement 

SSE establishes a global fabric that connects all edges into a common security platform. All traffic, between any two edges, is inspected by SSE and the full set of corporate policies can be enforced for threat prevention and data protection. SSE provides consistent security policy enforcement down to a single user, avoiding the need to compromise on depth of security controls to small locations due to budget and maintenance concerns. For complete enterprise protection, SSE must be able to inspect not only user-to-application web traffic but also traffic to legacy applications, traffic across physical locations, and traffic exchanged between non-human edges like applications and IoT devices.  

Reduced Attack Surface with Zero Trust Access (ZTA) 

SSE implements zero trust access by ensuring users can only access authorized applications (“least privilege access”) and application access is continuously assessed for anomalies such as threats, attacks, and data loss. SSE solutions vary in the way they deploy zero trust access, how application connectivity is established, and how trust is verified. Some SSE products use application connectors to create an overlay on top of the enterprise network and do not continuously inspect the traffic between the user and the application. Others implement identity-aware segmentation of the network that requires no additional components and perform deep packet security inspection of all traffic.  

Elastic, High Performance Security Inspection   

SSE is a cloud-native and cloud-based solution that is delivered through a global backbone comprised of points of presence (PoPs). The PoPs must be able to secure the traffic at any scale without impacting the user experience. To achieve that, PoPs must easily scale vertically and horizontally, reside within 25ms of every business location and user, and leverage optimal routing for both local and global traffic. SSE providers choose between building their own clouds on low-overhead physical infrastructure or host their SSE PoPs in the public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) nodes that can handle the compute requirements.   

Improved Security Posture 

SSE providers are security and cloud specialists. The SSE provider’s SOC monitors the threat landscape and deploys mitigations to emerging threats, offloading this critical activity from the customers’ IT staff. The SOC extends the customer’s skill set with unique expertise that ensures users are always protected and the attack surface is limited.  

 
SSE Reduces IT Workload without Customer Involvement 

SSE providers have established processes to continuously update the cloud service with new enhancements and fixes without any involvement from the customer. This self-maintaining capability is key to reducing the total cost of ownership of IT infrastructure and diverting key IT resources to business-focused activities instead of the grunt work of “keeping the lights on.” As a cloud service, the underlying PoPs should backup one another, and users and locations should seamlessly move to another PoP if one becomes inaccessible. This improves uptime and eliminates the need for complex high availability design. 

Cato SSE 360: Total Visibility, Optimization, and Control of All Enterprise Traffic  

Cato SSE 360 goes beyond the limited scope of SSE internet security, to provide total visibility, optimization, and control of all traffic, users, and applications everywhere. With a seamless path to SASE, plus endpoint protection and XDR, the benefits of streamlined networking and security infrastructure can be extended even further. With Cato, enterprises realize an improved security posture, deeper cost savings, and greater business agility. Find out more at Cato SSE 360.