Cisco is honored to win the CRN 2020 Tech Innovators Award for Cisco Secure Access Edge (SASE). This is truly an endorsement to our world class engineering and product management teams in delivering our SASE offer for secured network connectivity at optimized cost with predictable digital experience toany endpointoverany WANconsumingany cloud workload or SaaS.

Why SASE and Why Now?

The big disruption is the main stream adoption of enterprise customers consuming business critical applications from cloud or directly as SaaS over the Internet.

This results in a very different expectation of the enterprise customers to have a Secure access service edge (SASE) architecture for the software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and Security into a cloud service, to deliver a cost optimized and on-demand digital experience.

1. New traffic patterns -direct internet breakouts from the branch, instead of branch traffic backhauling from the Data Centers
2. Productivity -employees to be productive over the internet, similar to the productivity over the classic private enterprise WAN
3. Security policies and compliance -security everywhere, instead of perimeter security defined by physical branches and datacenter

Cisco has responded to our enterprise customers by delivering our SASE offer by unifying our industry leading solutions of Cisco SD-WAN and Cisco Umbrella with simple and intuitive consumption models.

Cisco SASE offers customers the choice to pace their SASE journey

Our enterprise customers have already deployed Cisco SD-WAN and Cisco Umbrella as the two industry leading offers to solve for this architectural evolution now referred to as SASE.

As we continue to listen and learn in evolving our SASE offer to further simplify, unify and optimize the digital experience, we are ensuring the customers can pace their journey with Cisco SASE. Customer can choose to leverage Cisco SD-WAN with on-prem branch security or cloud edge hosted security or Cisco Umbrella for cloud only security to meet their current and future requirements from Site to Cloud and SaaS, and for the remote teleworkers. Similarly customers select Cisco as a trusted partner for all the evolving requirements in the SASE ecosystem, like the capability for SD-WAN fabric to support existing connectivity like MPLS, Internet, G4/LTE and be 5G ready and the dynamic capability of the SD-WAN fabric to scale on- demand to the number of sites and choice of multiclouds, and optimize for all their SaaS applications.

"Building a SASE architecture with Cisco solutions allowed Tamimi Markets to efficiently utilize their cloud applications and secure their distributed IT environment"
Read the blog:Tamimi Markets Leads with SASE Architecture from Cisco

How is Cisco SASE differentiated and what can we expect next?

Cisco SASE is the only industry offering that can be consumed as a single and complete architecture with a simple and intuitive consumption model. Cisco SASE will continue to address our customer requirements with various industry-first innovations to enable use cases and innovative services that were not imaginable in the recent past. As evident with some of the recent public announcements with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Megaport, Equinix and Google Cloud, we are innovating to address global latency at cloud-scale for a SASE everywhere architecture with simplicity and TCO as the guiding principles.

Find out more about building SASE architectures with Cisco SD-WAN and Umbrella!

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