As the threat of cyberattacks looms over every business, organizations need to invest in solutions that help combat adversaries—regardless of attack vectors. One such attack vector is intercepting network activity, which can be used to steal information and modified to disguise malicious activities.
Traditional network security methods such as firewalls or VPNs can be exploited, exposing organizations to threats. However, organizations can use Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and its software-defined perimeter (SDP) to obscure their network traffic from prying eyes and threat actors.
In traditional networking models, the corporate network is surrounded by a perimeter of firewalls and access points, encased in the four walls of the office. Employees either operate within the network, safe from outside forces, or connect to it remotely via porting methods like Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) or VPNs. Hybrid work models and recent vulnerabilities have called that model into question, both in terms of scalability and security.
Unlike these setups, SASE solutions often leverage agents downloaded onto devices, systems, and infrastructure. The agent facilitates secure connection from the device to a private network backbone, accessible globally, which then routes traffic to its intended destination. As a result, the network perimeter is defined solely by the SASE software, reducing/eliminating the need for dedicated hardware to establish network security.
This SDP in turn provides multiple benefits, both in terms of scalability and security. Because the SDP relies on the device-bound agent, it operates wherever the user has a reliable internet connection. This means that a user could be in the office, at home, or even using public Wi-Fi on the go, and still securely access their network resources.
Because the agent communicates directly with the private SDP backbone before routing out to the internet, traffic is obscured from external parties. This cuts down on adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks, packet sniffing/spoofing, or other similar tactics. The private global backbone also ensures uptime, enabling connections to other nearby regions for failovers in case of outages.
Unlike VPNs or other remote connections, the SDP through SASE is always on. Device-bound, it kicks in as soon as the machine establishes a connection instead of waiting for a credential login to initiate. This keeps devices protected from network-driven attacks whenever the device is functioning, taking user engagement out of the equation for more continuous security coverage.
Due to these benefits, the SASE SDP proves useful in several critical circumstances.
The most prominent of these is for securing remote access. Because it operates wherever users do, the SDP is invaluable for keeping remote workers’ internet access protected. This is especially pertinent for public Wi-Fi networks, which are notorious for being exploited, and in turn, the people connected to them.
With the SASE SDP, user traffic is essentially rendered invisible to everyone who isn’t connected to the private backbone. In practice, it limits network access only to trusted devices within the organization while filtering out attacks targeting unsecured network access points.
Building off the explanation above, another key use case of SASE SDP is keeping bad actors out of infrastructure. Although the rise of the cloud improved scalability and remote access, it also made it so that anyone with a set of credentials could access cloud-bound resources.
By obscuring publicly accessible infrastructure behind the software-defined perimeter, it becomes no longer publicly accessible, limiting access only to those who have authenticated on authorized devices with the SASE agent. This puts extra layers of defense in front of bad actors who may have illegally purchased credentials or phished them from an end user.
Zero trust security is one of the top approaches for securing assets and reducing risk, even recommended by the U.S. government. The approach depends on a “trust nothing, verify everything” model, limiting access to resources, such as the internal network, based on identity authentication and other methods to prove users are in fact who they claim to be.
Using the SDP, organizations take the first steps towards a ZTNA approach, restricting access to internal network assets to only authorized devices. Then, users must authenticate to the device, helping establish levels of trust that can be backed by additional verifications like multi-factor authentication (MFA). And, operating within the controlled private backbone, traffic blocks and errors are logged and monitored to further verify activities, making it easy to identify anomalies that indicate potential compromise.
Within the SDP, administrators can also establish policies to limit user access and reduce attack surfaces, another core aspect of the ZTNA framework. Examples of such policies include using content and DNS filtering to restrict access to potentially malicious sites. The SDP also allows for routing through specified IP addresses to further restrict access to sensitive resources based on meeting certain conditions.
As a completely software-defined solution, the SASE SDP helps organizations reduce the amount of hardware they need to effectively manage and secure their network. The result is less capital expenditure on dedicated systems and minimal investment in infrastructure that inevitably needs to be updated/replaced.
An interesting side effect of this use case is that, since the backbone of the SDP is completely managed and hosted in the cloud, organizations also have less maintenance to perform to ensure uptime and availability. This reduces overhead spending on network engineering and other IT-related duties that can take valuable time out of an admin’s day, especially at smaller companies where IT’s time is scarce.
Understanding its benefits and use cases, a software-defined perimeter through SASE gives organizations a way to secure remote access and protect their environment from attacks while reducing costs. And, since it’s agent-driven, cloud hosted, and managed, it can be deployed easily to implement effective network security at a global scale.
To learn more about SDP, SASE, and how you can use them to improve your organization’s network security, read our eBook, “SASE Explained: The Complete Guide to SASE.” In it, we cover how SASE meshes SDP with other technologies to enable the future of networking security.
Download your free copy today.
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