Global Elix 
Cloud-native services and solutions have made their way into our lives as essential tools since the pandemic started. Many individuals and organizations utilize cloud apps and services for completing various tasks and processes while keeping their sensitive data safe. Especially for businesses, ensuring cyber security is crucial since they store their network assets and confidential data on the cloud.
The cloud environment and the Internet are home to widespread malicious cyber threats and cybercriminals. Millions of users and organizations fall victim to cybercriminals and get their data stolen daily. Also, other cyber security risks, such as malware, viruses, and worms, continue to threaten and damage business networks.
Now that enterprises leverage cloud services and their workforce requires constant remote access; threat prevention and data protection are vital for ensuring sustainability and productivity while avoiding financial and reputational damages. Unfortunately, the complexity of securing cloud environments and remote access makes traditional network security approaches ineffective.
That’s why many cloud security solutions are available nowadays. One of the core cloud security solutions is security service edge (SSE). Today’s topic will expand on SSE benefits and importance, provide insight into return on investment calculations, and give real-world examples of successful SSE implementation.
Introduction to SSE and Its Significance
Since many organizations adopted the cloud, SaaS, and IaaS into their network, legacy technologies fail to protect the distributed data across business networks. That’s because on-premise data centers can’t control connections between cloud apps and users. With traditional legacy solutions, organizations try to regulate distributed data and connections through VPNs, which slows down inspection. As more cloud infrastructures and branch locations join the network, inspecting and securing all traffic from every endpoint and edge becomes harder. In return, this can hinder productivity and increase the attack surface.
Since legacy solutions are unable to offer proper security for modern business networks due to the complexities of infrastructure, the SSE (security service edge) framework resolves these challenges around the cloud, remote access, and digital transformation with its cloud centric security capabilities. Also, SSE minimizes business risks, vulnerabilities, and gaps created between stacked security solutions. Overall, SSE provides better security services, risk mitigation, seamless user access, and increased productivity.
SSE is essentially a framework that protects all your users, data, resources, and endpoints in a business network with advanced features. SSE offers holistic protection for the cloud, SaaS, and IaaS assets as well. It also covers the security aspects of SASE’s scope. In other words, SSE shares similar security capabilities and components with secure access service edge architecture.
SSE architecture has three core components with additional features. These core components are ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access), cloud access security broker (CASB), and secure web gateway. With these features, SSE provides a layer of threat prevention, secure remote access, data protection, and access management.
ZTNA: Zero trust network access combines identity access management practices and the principle of least privilege to track traffic to sensitive data and verify if the authorization is legitimate with multi-factor authentication.
CASB: Cloud access security broker enforces policies to control the interaction between SaaS applications and private network resources.
SWG: Secure web gateways enforce policies to inspect web traffic across the network.
Enhancing Productivity with SSE
By nature, SSE provides multiple great benefits that enhance productivity with many key security services and features. By resolving security complexities and increasing network performances, businesses can increase operational efficiency with SSE. Security service edge can take the load of day-to-day operations, improve functionality, and reduce operational overhead.
Reducing Security Risks and Costs
Security service edge is one of the key data protection technologies. SSE tool’s key capability is preventing network security threats and vulnerabilities in the cloud services so that data protection is ensured at all times. With cloud data loss prevention and zero trust access control policies in SSE platforms, businesses can also enable least privileged access to eliminate unauthorized user access, track accessed data and user traffic, and take immediate action in the event of a breach to ensure data never leaves private and cloud apps in the network. By minimizing business risk and security threats through advanced threat prevention capabilities, SSE frameworks secure remote workers and protect sensitive data.
Also, Security Service Edge’s distributed architecture improves performance while cutting unnecessary costs for IT teams and outsourcing costs. The network consolidation capability of SSE helps businesses distribute security policies across all devices regularly without increasing resource usage.
Improved User Experience and Customer Satisfaction
The unified cloud platform of SSE provides an efficient route to cloud services and apps for all user traffic without latency issues, poor user experience, and compromising end user’s device posture. SSE cloud allows businesses to deploy security near the needed resources and users. This way, businesses can avoid overpacked data channels that slow down inspection.
So, SSE establishes speed, reliability, flexibility, and agility for all your devices and mobile users while providing secure remote access. All these SSE benefits ensure improved security posture, enhanced user experience, and customer satisfaction.
SSE and Remote Workforce Productivity
The legacy technologies fail to maintain enhanced security and the connectivity demands of a distributed workforce. Companies couple legacy security technologies with VPNs to manage distributed and secure remote connections to sensitive network assets. This combination not only slows down the inspection of a high frequency of remote connections but the connection speeds as well.
Because of this, modern remote workforce productivity decreases greatly due to the latency in access. A security service edge eliminates these limitations and enables handling remote access with robust security and performance. So, implementing SSE enables organizations to increase their employee productivity and satisfaction.
Measuring ROI with SSE Implementation
The return on investment measurement for SSE platforms depends on several factors related to the capabilities and the benefits of the framework. Note that customer satisfaction and increased productivity are two critical drivers of return on investment. Efficiency gains, risk reductions, cost optimization, scalability, affordability, speed, and agility are all metrics for SSE ROI calculations. Also, capital expenditures and operational expenditures are considered for multiple components of SSE platforms.
Since there are disparate factors involved, organizations need to assess the metrics unique to their business and create an SSE ROI model for 3 to 5 years accordingly. Identifying a main relevant ROI element and two other supporting elements is suggested for businesses to determine whether SSE will contribute or not. This way, organizations can assess the profitability of SSE.
Real-World Examples of SSE Success Stories
A well-known hospital in the US had a complex network infrastructure with multiple data centers, cloud-based applications, and large datasets coming from a growing number of endpoints. It was struggling to protect a large amount of sensitive patient data and its core network assets. To combat these challenges and monitor traffic from a unified cloud centric platform, the hospital implemented an SSE solution. While ensuring sensitive patient data safety, it simplified the hospital’s security stack and boosted effectiveness. On top of this, SSE allowed the hospital to comply with industry-specific standards such as HIPAA.
A famous multinational manufacturing company with a remote workforce and private and cloud apps had trouble managing its global network operations. Numerous security solutions and diverse applications made the company network infrastructure complex to manage. Also, the remote workforce needed secure access to complete their tasks and operations. The company integrated SSE platforms into its security infrastructure and achieved scalable security capabilities for providing secure access.
Conclusion: Maximizing Business Gains through SSE
Security service edge SSE gets rid of the incompetence of legacy tools for businesses to establish a robust security posture against cyber security threats. Overall, SSE offers cost reduction, enhanced modern workforce productivity, increased operational efficiency and network performance, threat prevention, and risk reduction. By implementing SSE, you can maximize your business gains, productivity, and customer satisfaction.
