/ Choosing Between SD-WAN, SSE, and SASE: Which Solution Fits Your Business Needs?
Choosing Between SD-WAN, SSE, and SASE: Which Solution Fits Your Business Needs?
Navigating today’s digital landscape requires secure, efficient, and scalable network solutions. As you evaluate options like SD-WAN, SSE, and SASE, the key challenge lies in aligning the right technology to fit your evolving needs. This short guide will help demystify these solutions and provide clarity on choosing the approach that best supports your business goals.
What is SD-WAN?
Intelligent network traffic optimization
Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology intelligently routes traffic across multiple connections, such as MPLS, broadband, and LTE. This approach reduces network costs and boosts agility for cloud and hybrid environments.
With its virtualized network overlay and centralized control, SD-WAN focuses on delivering reliable connectivity, simplifies WAN management, and ensures seamless user experiences for today’s modern, distributed networks. SD-WAN makes use of secure connections (typically over VPN), but is not a security solution in and of itself.
What Is SSE?
Holistic cloud-delivered security
Security service edge (SSE) is the cloud-based security “slice” of SASE. While SASE combines security and networking, SSE’s sole focus is protecting users, devices, and data without changing network architecture. Like SASE, core elements include zero trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), and firewall as a service (FWaaS).
SSE provides consistent, scalable protection for distributed workforces, offering centralized control and strong threat defense for organizations prioritizing security over network management.
What Is SASE?
End-to-end secure connectivity
Secure access service edge (SASE) combines networking and security into a unified, cloud native solution. It integrates SD-WAN, SWG, CASB, ZTNA, and FWaaS to deliver secure, scalable access for users and devices anywhere.
With centralized policy management, simplified operations, enhanced flexibility, and consistent protection everywhere, SASE helps modern hybrid work environments thrive.
Which Should You Choose?
Let's bring it all together around secure remote access. Traditional SD-WAN improves connectivity, but it extends trust between locations, widening your attack surface. SSE delivers zero trust security, but needs to be coupled with a networking solution that doesn't undermine zero trust.
If your organization is looking to embrace zero trust in your security and access, the right choice depends on your unique environment and operational goals. Whatever they are, Zscaler has you covered.
Zero Trust SD-WAN
Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN provides fast, reliable access to the internet and private applications. Its direct-to-cloud architecture offers stronger security and greater operational simplicity than traditional hybrid WAN, enabling you to connect and protect your entire ecosystem.
- Improve user experience and productivity
- Minimize the internet attack surface
- Prevent lateral threat movement
- Deploy and integrate with ease
SSE Platform: Zero Trust Exchange
The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ meets all the SSE needs of a modern, cloud-centric security strategy with comprehensive threat and data protection. As a unified, consolidated platform, it reduces complexity and cost while securing all users, apps, and data.
- Minimize the attack surface
- Prevent compromise
- Eliminate lateral movement
- Stop data loss
Zero Trust SASE
Zscaler Zero Trust SASE builds on the leading AI-powered security service edge (SSE) platform with a new approach to SD-WAN that securely and reliably connects users, locations, and cloud services via the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange.
- Extend zero trust beyond workforces
- Unify security and network access
- Improve user experiences
- Reduce cost and complexity
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
- SD-WAN: Solves performance and connectivity issues by ensuring efficient traffic routing and WAN optimization across distributed networks.
- SSE: Addresses security challenges by providing centralized, cloud-based protection for users, devices, and applications, especially in hybrid work setups.
- SASE: Combines both SD-WAN and SSE to address performance and security simultaneously, making it ideal for organizations with distributed infrastructures and cloud-heavy deployments.
- SD-WAN and SSE are not inherently integrated, but organizations often use them together by linking SD-WAN with third-party cloud security solutions (SSE).
- SASE is explicitly designed to integrate SD-WAN and SSE into a single, unified architecture, simplifying deployment and management while offering holistic connectivity and security.
- SD-WAN: Provides basic security features, such as traffic encryption and firewall integration, but relies heavily on external security tools for full protection.
- SSE: Delivers comprehensive cloud-based security services (e.g., ZTNA and SWG) tailored for modern challenges related to remote work, cloud apps, and web traffic.
- SASE: Integrates SD-WAN’s basic security features with SSE’s advanced capabilities, providing a combined security and networking approach through a single platform.
Yes, SASE essentially merges SD-WAN and SSE into one unified framework. However, the true value of SASE lies in its architectural design that seamlessly integrates networking and security services to address the evolving needs of modern organizations. It simplifies security and network management by offering centralized control and scalability.
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