By the Numbers: The Value Metrics of SASE

IT leaders are beginning to see Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) as the answer to the question of how they’ll harness change to deliver competitive advantage, maximize budgets, and build on existing investments.

SASE converges networking and network security functions towards an as-a-service, cloud-edge model. Just as the cloud offers multiple benefits over on-premises data centers, SASE further expands advantages across business and IT.

What does this mean, though? How does this architecture deliver value? Let’s explore several ways organizations can measure the total cost of ownership (TCO) for SASE.

Consolidation counts

If there’s an outage or performance issue in a multi-vendor environment, IT must investigate every piece of their siloed network individually—including wireless, WAN edge, ISP, and more. Data centers suffered an annual average of 2.4 “total facility shutdowns” lasting 138 minutes, according to a recent survey from Ponemon Institute. That’s one reason enterprises are consolidating vendors, with 86% now using 20 or fewer, according to Cisco.

Since about 80% of total IT costs occur after the initial purchase, the greatest potential to reduce TCO occurs within opex. Breaking down the walls of multi-vendor silos and imparting visibility across the infrastructure lets organizations reduce opex, improve user experience, and enhance IT productivity and the ability to work on new projects more securely.

Disrupting downtime

Multi-vendor environments require integration and multiple management systems, causing or delaying quick resolution of performance problems. Complex integrations, upgrade inefficiencies, and configuration errors are only some causes of unplanned downtime. One hour of downtime costs 40% of enterprises between $1 million and $5 million. One mission-critical server or application could cost $1,667 per minute during downtime.

Companies will spend about $650 billion by 2030 due to system downtime and recovering from cybersecurity breaches. Because of its more resilient architecture, cloud infrastructure could curtail downtime by approximately 57%, reducing the cost of breaches by more than 25%, and SASE should further reduce downtime chances.

Safety—in and out of the office

Most organizations invest in enterprise security for office environments to protect employee devices and data, but what about away from headquarters? Post-pandemic, more organizations leverage hybrid or fully remote work, with employees away from desks up to 60% of the time. This strategy lets organizations cut office and energy costs and reach a broader base of candidates when hiring new employees.

Because of SASE’s consolidation, it’s faster and easier for technology teams to scale and maintain a consistent networking and security architecture for workers wherever they are. Moreover, consolidated architecture helps create a common experience for employees, regardless of device or physical location, reducing training requirements and IT support tickets.

Competitive edge

Embracing rapid change and adopting new ideas could be priceless in enabling new or additional business. Because it breaks down complex, multi-vendor technology barriers to a simple, standardized secure digital foundation, SASE infrastructure can accelerate time-to-market for new products or services.

Being early to a market in a product category might enable an organization to become synonymous with the offering. As competitors play catch-up, that first-in advantage can lead to even more opportunities.

Getting SASE

SASE is evolving as networks and network security features continue toward integration. That does not mean IT decision-makers cannot today begin—or benefit from—their organizations’ path to SASE.

Keeping this architecture in mind as they design and deploy infrastructure solutions empowers IT leaders to build for the present and design for the future.

Since it builds toward the integration of networking and network security with cloud-edge solutions, SASE provides a path toward multiple TCO-savings opportunities via an architecture designed to easily grow with each business.

Meraki gets SASE. We make it simple. Here’s how.