In the world of information technology, with plenty of acronyms, in 2019 the consulting firm Gartner coined one that would soon become classic: SASE (secure access service edge). It designates an integrated security architecture for the usual broadband networks within companies. It was argued that networks, and with them security, were changing focus: the identity of the user was becoming more relevant to security than the primacy of the data center. The pandemic and teleworking would validate that intuition.
This allows us to understand where the confluence between two formally separate categories (connectivity and security) comes from, but doomed to pair up; the result is the unification of services –this is the key to the adoption of SASE– whose purpose is to guarantee the cleanliness of user access to corporate networks from different locations within an extensive network (WAN, in the jargon of the sector). . This confirms the dynamics of a market that is growing spectacularly, and it is common for a company to have to manage a dozen or more security components from different vendors.
A case for analysis is Aruba, a company in its twenties that was born as a provider of pure connectivity solutions, but it didn't take long to understand that it should have its own security solutions; this conviction would be reinforced after being acquired by HPE in 2019.
The general director of the Spanish subsidiary of Aruba, Iker del Fresno, stresses that the fiscal year of 2022 has been the best in the company's history in Spain. "Although more relevant than the figures themselves, has been our conversion to a business as a service, emphasizing SASE as our differential in this market."
The technology that occurred with the absorption in 2020 of the American Silver Peak has allowed Aruba to establish itself in sectors such as retail chains, banking and insurance, in which it was previously only present at the branch level.
Del Fresno points out that Aruba multiplied by five the number of projects in the portfolio in 2022, a hundred at the end of the fiscal year, which will feed the billing of 2023. With new products presented last year, it can launch into the data center market, a space dominated by by Cisco in which I had not participated until now. “I think we have a different message than our main competitor, by separating connectivity and security elements.”
A report that the company has just published about the market prospects for this year points to the generalization of the NaaS (networks as a service) concept as the first feature. It is basically a delivery model based on billing according to consumption. “With a solution like ours – Del Fresno adds – customers can double the volume of information and at the same time significantly lower the cost of cloud consumption”.
To this end, Aruba has its own tool to calculate how much can be saved: “We can help reduce between 35% and 40%; some high percentages, because, as the statistics show, the consumption of network capacities is rising tremendously. This is a structural trait and, in fact, it shows up in any conversation with an IT manager.”
Basically, the interview confirms Gartner's forecast when it named the phenomenon: "SASE's progression may be more or less rapid, but in any case it will make the obsolescence of current network security models more evident" .
