SASE vs SD-WAN

SASE and SD-WAN are two distinct technologies used to connect geographically endpoints to Applications hosted centers.

SD-WAN is an application of SDN, provides an overlay network to connect all remotely managed branch offices to Data Centers or central private networks. However, now SD-WAN is also being adapted to connect to the cloud but is not very cloud-focused.

SASE is cloud-focused technology and has distributed Architecture. SASE connects to individual endpoints like a branch office, individual user, or single device to service edge, and these service edges consist of a network of distributed Pops where the SASE software stack runs.

SASE uses private data centers, Public clouds, and colocation facilities, and these POPs form a Service edge SASE stack run. These POPs are also often present in the public cloud or close to public cloud gateways for secure, low-latency access to cloud resources. SASE determines optimal routes for traffic to use while heading to its endpoint.

Main Aim of the SASE is to provide secure access to distributed resources, which can be in private data centers, in Colocation facilities, or in the cloud. SASE has security tools that reside in a user device as a security agent as well as in the cloud as a cloud-native software agent.

Whereas in SD-WAN, Security is often delivered via secondary features or third-party vendors. Some SD-WAN products have some built-in Security but are not educated to provide enterprise-level security. In SD-WAN, Security tools are usually located at offices in CPE rather than on the device itself.  

In SASE, traffic is opened up one time and inspected by multiple policy engines at once. The engines run in parallel without passing the traffic between them. This saves time because the traffic isn’t repeatedly accessed as it is passed from one security function to the next, as is the case in an SD-WAN. Additionally, these policy engines do as much, if not more, than the security tools in an SD-WAN.

A SASE network is focused on providing cloud-native security tools and has the cloud at the center of the network.

SD-WAN technology is focused on connecting offices to a central headquarters and data center, though it can also connect users directly to the cloud.

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