What is Security Service Edge (SSE)?

As the world becomes increasingly reliant on the cloud, cybercriminals have increased their interest in infiltrating it. Cloud-based applications can become infected, and employees can unintentionally disseminate data and information to the wrong people via the cloud. And this is happening more and more as remote employees work from unsecured connections. These types of threats and challenges have led organizations to look for a security solution that will protect them while working from the cloud. A Security Service Edge (SSE) solution is among the best option among all cloud security options available.

What is Security Service Edge (SSE)?

Security Service Edge (SSE) is a cyber security concept introduced by Gartner in 2021. SSE is the security component of the secure access service edge (SASE). Gartner defines SSE as a collection of integrated, cloud-centric security capabilities that includes Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Firewall as-a-service (FWaaS), and Secure Web Gateway (SWG). The goal of SSE is securing access to all web and cloud services as well as locally hosted applications.

SSE enables users of an organization’s applications, data, and assets secure, trusted access to resources and provides the ability to track user behavior to help identify anomalies that may be caused by bad actors or cyber attacks.

How does SSE work?

An SSE solution secures remote access to the web, cloud services, and private applications.

Traditionally, enterprises centrally hosted their applications in data centers, facilitating a variety of security inspections such as firewalls and IDS/IPS. With applications moving to the cloud and remote working initiatives, enterprises now struggle to protect their applications from external threats as they operate in distributed environments outside the traditional security perimeter. Legacy network infrastructures prevent IT departments from monitoring all connections between users and SaaS applications. Additionally, directing cloud-destined traffic to the data center for security inspection significantly – and negatively – impacts application performance and user experience.

Security Service Edge solutions are cloud-delivered services that enable organizations to perform advanced security inspections closer to endpoints, including users and devices. It creates a dynamic security perimeter that provides threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and access control regardless of where users connect.

What are the benefits of SSE?

As the demands of a remote workforce and customer base have increased, enterprises have struggled with the challenge of reducing the complexity of their security strategy while improving security and user experience. Security Service Edge (SSE) consolidated technologies have proven effective in decreasing the complexity of endpoint protection while increasing cloud services security throughout an enterprise.

A complete SSE strategy offers enterprises a comprehensive set of security technologies that provide benefits to employees and stakeholders – on-site and remote:

• Direct, safe internet access to applications, tools, data, and resources from anywhere in the world, while reducing processing traffic for unauthorized access, data, risk, and threats, improving processing traffic for unauthorized access, data risk, and threats, eliminating the need to route traffic back through the data center
• Faster, secure, more efficient connectivity to the web, cloud, and private apps when accessing application resources from any user, any device, anywhere
• Monitoring and tracking the behavior of users accessing the network
• Threat defense within the cloud and from any web destination, detecting both cloud-native attacks and advanced malware
• Data protection through the internet, within the cloud, and moving from cloud-to-cloud
• Enabling secure Zero Trust access to data and applications based on user identity, context, and least privileged access

Why is Security Service Edge needed?

As more companies adopt cloud services like SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), the need for more comprehensive security solutions also increases. The pandemic situation has fastened the upgradation due to a surge in remote users who access the cloud applications and database. The two primary reasons for the need for service security edge are:

Technological Advancement

Along with new technologies, the ratio of sophisticated cyber-attacks is also increasing. Traditional security components are becoming insufficient to handle such advanced attacks. Some classical security features are on-premise data centers, VPN verification, remote firewalls, and more. Such measures cannot solve the latest security issues. Therefore, the SSE provides an advanced solution that helps to monitor, identify and prevent cyber threats.

Cumulative Security

Opting for individual security solutions for each aspect of business can be a hectic and time-consuming task. Having comprehensive security is highly impossible if the applications are not communicating with each other. So, it is essential to have a single point of control for all the security products in an organization. Here, the SSE provides elaborate policies and practices to combine all the individual solutions to create an integrated security solution. It acts as a platform for all security features to work together.

The SSE frameworks bring centralized control and operational ease visibility throughout the structure. As a result, the organization can improve its efficiency and advanced security features with this approach.

Top Security Service Edge use cases

Secure web and cloud usage

Allow workers to securely access the information they need, whether it is general internet access or corporate applications hosted in the cloud, or delivered as SaaS. A unified policy framework helps protect these workers from internet-based threats like ransomware as well as protect corporate information stored across various cloud, SaaS, and private applications. Prevent any policy misconfigurations and mitigates any risk as a result of human error or policy mismatches in the cloud.

Detect and mitigate threats

Allow IT to discover any unauthorized activities by users in terms of using unsanctioned SaaS apps to share corporate information. This enables IT to secure these apps and allows users to continue using these apps while following proper security practices. Discover and remediate any malicious content by inspecting all incoming and outgoing internet traffic and preventing harm to corporate networks including stealing of sensitive information. Prevent unauthorized access to apps based on adaptive access policies that are based on the user’s risk, device posture, and user location.

Connect and secure remote workers

Provide users the flexibility to use any device from any location with agent-based and agentless access to private apps. Protect remote workers from internet-based threats like ransomware and phishing attacks.

Identify and protect sensitive information

Discover sensitive information automatically with inline controls which allow enforcement of security policies on the fly, and prevent exposure of sensitive data in real-time. Prevent exposure of sensitive data, even if files are shared with external parties like partners, and contractors, with embedded security policies within the files.

Conclusion

Thanks to enhanced security features and services, Security Service Edge platforms will be future-proof as enterprises adopt SSE as a single platform. Digital experience management, which enables IT to immediately discover technical difficulties in the user-to-cloud app link, is one tool that is starting to move into SSE.

In addition, network service aggregation and an SSE platform are important, as stated by the SASE architecture. This offers solid support for multi-cloud connectivity, local branch office accessibility, and SD-WAN services communication. As the cloud environment for your company evolves, you can guarantee capacity for expansion without increasing complexity by concentrating on SASE service providers who are also pushing SSE development.