At the convergence of digital transformation, an industry-wide focus on SASE, and the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, there are key forces that security practitioners need to be aware of and operate within. This is the first blog in a series of three detailing these forces and how security leaders and practitioners can adapt to them in a digitally transforming, SASE-enabled world. This blog covers the forces of Business Strategy and Information Technology Operations.

Recall from Part One that we identified three different places in a SASE product where TLS 1.3 support is relevant. In descending order of importance, those places are: proxy, tunnel, and management interface.

TLS is the most important protocol for secure communication with web sites and cloud services. Any vendor with ambitions in the SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) market has to be able to proxy TLS at scale. That requires considerable sophistication in terms of designing the computing and networking infrastructure for a SASE “security cloud,” but it also requires attention to the details of TLS itself.