With 88% of organizations supporting hybrid or remote working models, it’s clear the way people work has changed. According to Axis Security, organizations realize that the way secure access is achieved must also adapt.
SSE Crowned Queen of Modern Workplace Safety
In less than two years since the term was first introduced, Security Service Edge (SSE) has become so popular that nearly three-quarters of cybersecurity professionals (71%) are now familiar with the category. Research finds that SSE is now more important than SSO, MFA, endpoint security and SIEM when it comes to Zero Trust. Additionally, 65 percent of organizations plan to adopt an SSE platform within the next 24 months, with 43 percent planning to implement it by the end of 2023.
This year, the industry will see SSE quickly emerge as a top strategic initiative for organizations as it plays an important role in the adoption of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and successful Zero Trust implementations. 67% said they would start their SASE strategy with an SSE platform, while 33% said they would use SD-WAN. One additional statistic found was on single-vendor SASE vs. single-vendor. Multi-vendor SASE preference. The audience is split (about 50% each).
Advantages of SSE technology in reducing costs and increasing productivity
The impact of remote and hybrid working has led to a proliferation of security solutions for organizations. The study found that 63 percent of businesses use 3 or more security solutions to enable access, while nearly a quarter utilize 6 or more. This contributes to increased business cost and management complexity. Respondents indicated that the complexity of access management ranks second when it comes to their greatest challenge, behind only the fact that traditional access solutions place too much built-in trust on users.
SSE services provide a way to reduce costs and reliance on both internal and external device stacks in the new macroeconomic environment. The top two traditional solutions that enterprise security teams would like to replace with SSE would be VPN concentrators (63%), SSL inspection services (50%) and DDoS (44%), with data loss prevention services (42%) coming very close fourth place.
Reduced costs, high availability and reliability have long been advantages of cloud services. It’s no surprise, then, that 60% of respondents said they prefer SSE services built on public cloud backbones. Additionally, there is overwhelming consensus that Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is important to any SSE platform (90%). When teams evaluate SSE, they prioritize platforms with DEM capabilities.
As teams consider where they should start using SSE for their business, nearly 50 percent of organizations decide to start by securing access for their remote and hybrid employees. And, given the mass adoption of hybrid work, it’s a logical starting point for businesses.
Dor Knafo, CEO of Axis, said: “Revealing these data reveals the truth about the adoption of SSE in the context of SASE, the importance of SSE compared to other Zero Trust ecosystem technologies, and the positive impact of SSE on business in the process of business transformation. “