What Is a Colocation Data Center? Benefits and Best Practices

by Jordan Baker | Dec 7, 2021 | Data Center Management

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The colocation data center market saw huge growth during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, reaching a value of $76.8 billion in 2023 and showing no signs of slowing down. Companies continue to move away from on-premises deployment strategies due to the expense and hassle of maintaining a data center, or to improve their resilience in the face of increasing cyberattacks and natural disasters. This blog discusses the benefits of adopting a colocation strategy and describes the best practices for optimizing colocation data center resilience.

What is a colocation data center?

Colocation is the process of deploying and hosting your servers and other equipment in a third-party data center, known as a colocation data center. This allows you to use someone else’s high-tech facilities and infrastructure instead of building out everything in your own (on-premises) space. It’s called colocation because you co-locate your equipment there – you’re renting cabinet space in a shared facility with other customers instead of using your own dedicated space. That means you still get to use your own servers, storage devices, and other hardware, but you can rely on the colocation facility to provide redundant power, climate control, physical security, and network infrastructure.

What are the benefits of colocation?

Colocation offers several advantages over on-premises deployments, including:

Cost

In terms of up-front costs, spinning up a new colocation deployment is less expensive than deploying a new on-premises data center. While you still have to purchase and install your own in-rack tech stack, as well as pay for monthly rental fees, power, and internet, the colocation provider handles the setup and maintenance of the facility itself. That means you won’t have to worry about things like HVAC and physical security yourself, helping to reduce both upfront and recurring costs.

Compliance

With on-premises infrastructure, your organization is 100% responsible for data protection and compliance. Colocation providers have a shared responsibility approach, meaning they are partially liable for certain services while you’re only responsible for the remainder. While this helps reduce complexity on your end, it can also increase compliance risk. You might adhere to all necessary rules and regulations on your end, but the third-party colocation facility might not. If that happens, you’re ultimately responsible for any issues discovered during an audit, regardless of the offense’s source. That said, there are compliant colocation data centers that are certified as meeting strict, specific regulatory requirements, which is recommended for organizations in highly regulated industries like defense and healthcare.

Geographic distribution

Colocation data centers make it easier to extend your geographic reach by reducing the cost and work involved in spinning up new locations. Rather than building out an entirely new facility every time you want to expand, you simply rent space in an existing data center in your chosen region. This allows you to, for example, improve the performance of your services in a particular area to meet increasing customer demand, or deploy artificial intelligence solutions closer to branch offices and remote manufacturing sites.

Scalability

Scaling an on-premises data center is time-consuming and expensive because you may need to build out additional racks, install more HVAC, and increase your power draw, among other concerns. By comparison, colocation facilities typically handle much of the work involved in scaling their infrastructure, so all you need to do is install your hardware in the rack. Scaling a colocation deployment is faster and more cost-effective than on-premises, enabling you to meet surging demand without busting your budget.

Resilience

The scalability and geographic distribution of colocation data center deployments can ultimately improve network resilience, or the ability to keep delivering digital services during adverse events like natural disasters or ransomware attacks. It’s easier to deploy redundant services and backup solutions in multiple regions as well as build-out a resilience system with alternative infrastructure that can take over when primary systems fail. A colocation strategy can help you minimize downtime and meet stringent SLA requirements with less expense and hassle than on-premises deployments.

Best practices for colocation data center resilience

Colocation deployments lend themselves to greater resilience by virtue of their potential geographic distribution and scalability, but there are steps you can take to shore up your resilience even more. These include:

Automation

Infrastructure automation solutions like zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) make it easier to spin-up new servers and hardware to replace those that fail or are compromised in a ransomware attack. Automated configuration management solutions like Red Hat Ansible help prevent unauthorized changes or botched updates from compromising critical systems.

AIOps

Artificial intelligence for IT operations, or AIOps, uses advanced machine learning algorithms to monitor and protect data center infrastructure. AIOps solutions help detect potential maintenance issues before they cause failures, automatically generate and triage incidents, and identify threats with far greater accuracy than traditional firewalls.

Environmental monitoring

Colocation providers are responsible for maintaining optimal conditions in the data center, but sometimes HVAC systems malfunction or a natural disaster occurs to throw things out of balance. Environmental monitoring systems use sensors deployed around the rack to collect data on temperature, humidity, airflow, and more, giving remote IT teams a virtual presence in the colocation facility. This allows them to respond to changing conditions much faster, potentially avoiding equipment failures or long-term maintenance issues.

Out-of-band management (OOBM)

Out-of-band management (OOBM) involves separating the control plane for data center infrastructure and making it accessible on an alternative network. The OOBM network doesn’t rely on any production infrastructure, meaning it’ll stay accessible even if there’s a critical failure or ransomware attack. OOBM console servers (a.k.a., serial consoles) provide a convenient, centralized management platform for the control plane while keeping infrastructure management interfaces completely isolated from the production network, further enhancing colocation resilience.

Optimize your colocation data center with Nodegrid

Nodegrid OOBM serial consoles provide a vendor-neutral control plane for colocation data center infrastructure. Nodegrid can extend ZTP to other vendors’ devices as well as host third-party automation, security, and AIOps solutions. It supports a wide range of USB environmental sensors as well as legacy and mixed-vendor infrastructure devices.

Schedule a free demo to see Nodegrid colocation data center solutions in action.

SecOps Best Practices for Enterprises

by Jordan Baker | Nov 30, 2021 | SecOps

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SecOps is the blending of security and IT operations into one combined set of workflows, tools, and methodologies. This increases the speed at which new infrastructure can be spun up without impacting the quality or security of your systems. Let’s discuss what SecOps means, how it works, and the SecOps best practices for enterprises.

What is SecOps?

SecOps is based on the DevOps philosophy, which blends software development and IT operations teams. Infrastructure configurations are abstracted as software, which is integrated, tested, and deployed using the same processes that application developers use. The SecOps methodology takes this a step further, removing barriers between the security and IT operations teams. SecOps focuses on integrating security processes into the provisioning, deployment, and management of systems and infrastructure.

Why is SecOps important?

The operations team will spin up new virtual and physical systems completely independently of security teams in a traditional IT department. Once a machine is ready to deploy, the security team will perform security checks and vulnerability testing. If there are any issues, deployment will be delayed until Ops can remediate the problem and perform security testing again. In the meantime, any business units waiting on that system—for instance, a development team trying to release new software on a tight schedule—lose valuable time. And that’s the best-case scenario.

Sometimes, in their haste to meet business demands, Ops will ignore the red flags discovered by security teams so they can still deploy infrastructure on schedule. Or, even worse, they’ll skip the security testing altogether and hope for the best. Either way, this can leave massive security vulnerabilities in business-critical, production infrastructure. For example, the Equifax breach in 2017 was caused by lax security processes, and went undetected for so long because of an expired certificate. That means this high-profile event might have been prevented if Equifax had integrated security processes into their IT operations.

SecOps brings security and operations teams together, allowing them to work simultaneously to provision infrastructure quickly and efficiently without sacrificing quality or security.

How SecOps uses DevOps principles to improve efficiency and security

SecOps enables teams to integrate security and operations processes by abstracting them as software code and introducing automation.

For Ops, that means infrastructure configurations and updates are written as software definition files that are centrally managed in a code repository. These definition files can be deployed automatically to many devices simultaneously, allowing enterprises to scale quickly and efficiently. This methodology is called infrastructure as code (IaC), and it’s a fundamental principle of DevOps, NetDevOps, and SecOps.

On the Sec side of SecOps, automatic security testing runs at multiple stages in the infrastructure provisioning process:

When the initial configuration is written: at this stage, testing is focused on bugs or mistakes in the configuration that could leave vulnerabilities open in the system.
When the configuration is integrated into the code repository: automatic testing ensures that the new code doesn’t conflict with other versions or introduce any issues to existing configurations.
The configuration will receive comprehensive functional, non-functional, and security testing in a dedicated testing environment before production.
In production: servers are continuously monitored and tested, with additional testing performed when patches are deployed, or other changes occur in the production environment.

Automatic security testing allows your teams to “shift left,” meaning issues and vulnerabilities are spotted and fixed as early in the provisioning process as possible, so you can work faster and with greater agility to meet the demands of your enterprise. This form of continuous and automatic testing is part of the CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) methodology, which is foundational to DevOps, NetDevOps, and SecOps.

When you combine IaC with CI/CD to implement SecOps in your enterprise, you’re able to spin up your infrastructure more rapidly and catch security vulnerabilities and other issues earlier in the process. Plus, since SecOps seeks to automate as many processes as possible, you can reduce the risk of human error in your infrastructure configurations and security testing.

With SecOps, you can improve your enterprise’s security posture while still increasing your productivity and efficiency.

The top SecOps best practices for enterprises

SecOps is a methodology or framework for operational security, not a technology solution you can purchase and spin up in your datacenter. If you want to implement SecOps in your enterprise, you’ll need to:

Build a collaborative culture within your organization

SecOps focuses on blending the security and IT operations teams, which means you should foster a culture of open communication and cross-functional collaboration. Mistakes should be openly discussed and resolved as a team effort, so nobody’s afraid to ask for help or point out security issues. Everybody’s role within the organization should also be clearly outlined, so nobody’s left fearing automation or redundancy. This will allow all your SecOps teams to fully embrace new tools and processes to make a smoother transition.

Provide the proper SecOps tools and training

You must empower your teams with the technology and training they need to implement SecOps processes successfully. In addition to automated testing and abstracting management processes as software, SecOps also requires other tools, such as:

Monitoring and visibility: You need to monitor, analyze, and visualize your SecOps infrastructure and applications to ensure optimal performance and security. It would be best if you partnered with a vendor-neutral solution that provides one central dashboard for observing and managing all your systems, whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud.
Incident response: An automated incident response solution can detect issues, follow predefined scripts and policies to remediate events automatically, and alert security teams and other stakeholders when human intervention is required.
Collaboration and sharing: You need a central repository with version control for your infrastructure and networking configurations. This allows your Sec and Ops teams to work with the same code simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes.

Once you’ve chosen which tools and processes to adopt, you’ll need to train your SecOps teams on how to use them. You should also ensure your staff has enough time to become comfortable using these skills and technologies at speed required for CI/CD and SecOps.

Following these best practices will ensure that your SecOps initiative is based on a solid foundation that includes team trust and collaboration, comprehensive training, and the best tools and technology for every SecOps process.

Further help implementing SecOps best practices

The value of SecOps is that you can increase the speed and efficiency of your IT operations while ensuring that security is a priority at every stage of the deployment process. To effectively implement SecOps, your enterprise needs to foster a culture of collaboration, invest in the right tools for the job, and train your teams on how to handle new workflows and technologies.

ZPE Systems is here to help your enterprise implement SecOps best practices. The Nodegrid family of hardware and software solutions provides SecOps capabilities such as:

Zero-touch provisioning to automatically configure end devices from anywhere in the world
Vendor-neutral interface abstraction so you can manage all your infrastructure solutions from one centralized control panel
Support for advanced security methodologies like Zero Trust and Security Service Edge (SSE)

Need more help implementing the SecOps best practices?

To learn more about how Nodegrid can help you implement SecOps best practices for your enterprise, contact ZPE Systems today.

HEAnet: providing network uptime for education

by Jordan Baker | Nov 15, 2021 | Case Studies, Failover Connectivity, Increase Productivity, Out of Band Management, Pillar 2 - Critical Remote, Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)

If there’s one sector that relies on network uptime more than ever before, it’s the education sector. For both in-person and virtual learning, students and staff connect to crucial resources around the world to share information. The infrastructure that enables this connectivity is critical, and in the country of Ireland, this infrastructure is deployed and maintained by HEAnet.

As the national education and research network, HEAnet is a provider who must adhere to stringent service levels in order to keep entire education communities online. But they recently faced a few major challenges as their out-of-band (OOB) management solution neared its end-of-life (EOL) date. This system was crucial to maintaining network uptime, as it gave engineers remote access to their 50+ nationwide locations. They needed to quickly roll out a new solution, but they were faced with a second challenge — limited staff.

It seemed HEAnet was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They would surely need to outsource the job, and that’s when they turned to Rahi, the world-renowned MSP who introduced them to ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid.

The rest is history, and for a deep dive into that lesson, download the full HEAnet case study below.

But before you do, here’s a quick refresher on critical infrastructure and why network uptime can be difficult to maintain.

Critical infrastructure and network uptime

Critical infrastructure is made up of the systems that connect sites to each other and to the rest of the world. The data center is an obvious example of where critical infrastructure is deployed. Points-of-presence (POPs) and colocations are other somewhat obvious examples. All of these house components, such as servers, switches, and routers, which are essential to handling data and traffic that organizations rely on.

Here are more examples of where critical infrastructure is commonly found:

Warehouses: servers, routers, and Wi-Fi access points help humans and their automated counterparts track inventories, fulfill orders, and communicate with vendors.
Manufacturing plants: operationalized technology like sensors and IoT devices collect data from gauges, robots, and machining equipment to ensure accurate measurements, maintain quality control, and streamline fabrication processes.
Cellular base stations: compute, storage, and failover devices process signals, store data, and provide backup connectivity for critical cell site components.

Organizations must maintain high levels of network uptime for their critical infrastructure, since it supports the lifeblood of everything they do. But this can be a challenge because these components are not always located within convenient reach of skilled engineers.

Why can network uptime be so challenging to maintain?

Maintaining network uptime can be challenging even for fully-staffed locations. This difficulty is amplified — quite dramatically — when organizations have to recover and maintain sites that are located far off the beaten path.

Imagine this: you’re responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting critical infrastructure for a network of college campuses in your region. One of your most remote sites, which serves more than one thousand students and faculty on any given day, experiences sudden disruptions and eventually goes offline. It’ll take close to four hours for you to put skilled staff on site to recover the network, which puts you at risk of breaching your SLA. You and your team are stressed out and scrambling, while students and teachers have no option but to cancel some or all of their activities.

Now imagine that you have a tool that allows you to respond instantly and restore the network before anyone even notices. That’s the kind of power you can achieve with a deep, robust out-of-band management solution, which is one of the tools HEAnet deployed to keep disruptions from reaching users.

There’s more that can go wrong, however. Your sites could suffer an ISP outage, leaving locations in the dark if they don’t employ any wireless backup connections. Or if your customer has a multi-vendor MSP solution that you’re part of, the other vendor’s components may be to blame, and you need a tool that can help you quickly diagnose the root cause.

Download the HEAnet case study

To see more challenges you might face when maintaining network uptime, download the HEAnet case study. You’ll also discover how Nodegrid gave them seamless backup connectivity and allowed a single Rahi engineer to deploy two sites in a single day. Get the case study now.

NetDevOps Transformation Process & Critical Steps for Network Professionals

by Jordan Baker | Nov 3, 2021 | Increase Productivity, NetDevOps Transformation

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The NetDevOps methodology helps organizations streamline their network, development, and IT operations through automation and cross-team collaboration. This blog will explain the NetDevOps transformation process and the critical steps you need to take to implement NetDevOps in your organization. First, let’s define NetDevOps.

What Is NetDevOps?

NetDevOps is the practice of applying DevOps principles to the network team. DevOps focuses on reducing the barriers between development and IT operations teams by encouraging greater collaboration and automation. It does this using various tools and methodologies, but of particular relevance are Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).

On the operations side, IaC automates the provisioning, configuration, and management of your data center infrastructure. This improves the speed at which systems can be added and updated, and reduces the amount of human error involved in system configuration. With IaC, you write infrastructure configurations as machine-readable code or definition files that describe the desired state of the machine. The code is managed like any other software development project, in a central repository with versioning control, and can be tested, deployed, and integrated automatically.
On the development side, continuous integration (CI) allows developers to frequently merge revisions and updates to code in the codebase or central repository. Automated tests run every time new code is checked in to ensure no bugs or security vulnerabilities are integrated into your build. This allows development and QA teams to find and fix problems early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Continuous delivery (CD) automatically deploys the new code into a test environment for further functional and non-functional testing, including load and integration testing. The code is then prepared for production.
Continuous deployment is essentially the same as continuous delivery, and some people use the two terms interchangeably. However, continuous deployment refers to the automated deployment to the production environment.

When we apply these principles to the network operations side of an IT environment, combined with a culture shift that emphasizes cross-team collaboration, we get the NetDevOps methodology.

NetDevOps transformation process and critical steps for network professionals

To achieve NetDevOps transformation in the enterprise, you’ll need to implement software-defined networking, which will allow you to apply CI/CD processes and streamline deployments. You will also need to shift the culture in your organization to prioritize eliminating the barriers between your cross-functional IT teams.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) for NetDevOps

Software-defined networking (SDN) is essentially just IaC for networking devices like routers, switches, and firewalls. With SDN, you can write machine-readable definition files to define the desired state of your device. The device will then install, update, or roll back its configuration based on the information in that definition file.

For example, imagine you have ten remote branch offices, each of them with two wireless access points (WAPs) that are the same make and model. Using SDN, you can easily deploy a third WAP to each location and automatically deploy a definition file that applies the current configuration, OS update version, and firmware version to those new devices at the click of a button. This saves your network engineers from having to spend their valuable time staging devices or traveling to deploy them in person. In addition, manually configuring devices and running CLI commands increases the risk of human error, so SDN can save you from costly mistakes by automating your network configurations.

Since the IT operations and networking teams have a lot of overlap in terms of knowledge and tools, it’s easy to see how IaC can apply to NetDevOps. But how does the software development methodology of CI/CD apply to networking?

Implementing CI/CD processes for NetDevOps configurations

SDN works by treating network device configurations as software code, allowing you to implement CI/CD processes for network configurations. To help you understand how that works, let’s examine the CI/CD pipeline from a network management perspective.

CI involves continuously integrating new code into the existing software repository by automatically merging changes and running tests. For NetDevOps transformation, SDN code is checked into a central repository. CI automatically applies version control and change management to ensure nobody accidentally breaks or writes over someone else’s code. In addition, automated unit tests run on the code to check for bugs.
Next, the CD will deliver the new SDN configuration to a testing environment, typically with virtualized devices on a private network. In this environment, you can perform automated testing. For example, load testing will check for performance issues, and security testing will ensure the definition file won’t introduce any vulnerabilities to your production network.
Finally, continuous deployment will automatically deploy your configured device to the production network. Since the SDN definition file was thoroughly tested in both the CI and CD stages, the device can go live on your network with minimal impact on end-users and business operations.

Now you understand the technological processes and tools that enable NetDevOps transformation. However, one of the most challenging aspects of any major organizational shift is getting all your people on board with the changes.

Encouraging an organizational shift towards NetDevOps culture

What do we mean when we say NetDevOps culture? The foundational principle of NetDevOps (and any other DevOps derivative) is breaking down barriers and informational silos between teams and encouraging collaboration and integration. This is done partially with software tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams that enable cross-team communication and collaboration—but it’s mostly a mindset.

People are resistant to change, mainly when it affects their work. Before your enterprise can fully adopt NetDevOps, you need a plan for communicating functional changes to your people and training them on how to adapt their workflows. For example, network engineers aren’t always comfortable writing code, so they may need some time to learn SDN and practice their new skills before you rush ahead with implementation. Your engineers will also need to learn how to use your specific SDN and network automation tools.

In addition, you need to foster a culture of open communication, especially involving mistakes. As everyone learns new systems and processes, someone will inevitably make mistakes or forget a new workflow. This can be incredibly stressful when your people are also dealing with a new organizational model in which the lines between departments are blurred, and there may be multiple managers involved in any task. That’s why it’s critical to develop a business culture that doesn’t punish mistakes or questions and instead encourages everyone to work together to solve problems. This culture shift will enable a smoother NetDevOps transformation for your enterprise.

Empower your NetDevOps transformation with Nodegrid

NetDevOps transformation requires fostering a culture of open collaboration and communication within your IT teams, which helps you automate your network device configurations using SDN and CI/CD for faster and more accurate deployments. Automation shouldn’t stop there, though—you should employ network automation for as many management tasks as possible to further streamline your operations.

For instance, you could use the Nodegrid network management solution to consolidate your data center infrastructure management behind one pane of glass. The Nodegrid family of hardware and software features zero-touch provisioning, which automatically discovers and adds new devices to your NetDevOps environment. Plus, Nodegrid is completely vendor-neutral, so you can easily integrate it with your SDN and CI/CD tools.

Want more information about how Nodegrid can empower your NetDevOps transformation?

Contact ZPE Systems online or call 1-844-4ZPE-SYS.

Security Service Edge (SSE) Implementation Guide for Enterprises

by Jordan Baker | Oct 29, 2021 | Improve Network Security, Security Service Edge (SSE)

Security Service Edge (SSE) is an emerging network security model that rolls up technologies like zero trust network access (ZTNA), cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), and next-generation firewalls/firewall as a service (FWaaS) into a cloud-centric security stack.

With these cloud security services, you can provide secure access to the cloud and software as a service (SaaS) resources for both on-premise and remote workers. This blog will dive into the essential technologies to achieve security service edge. We’ll also discuss the benefits these technologies can provide to your enterprise, as well as tips and best practices for streamlining your SSE implementation.

SSE implementation guide for enterprises

Enterprises may choose to implement SSE by purchasing an all-in-one solution that includes the core components of security service edge. Other teams prefer to buy each security technology separately so they can select the best vendor for their particular use case, or because they already have some SSE capabilities with their existing security stack and only need to supplement with one or two additional solutions.

Let’s take a look at the key security service edge technologies that you need to implement to achieve SSE for your enterprise.

Zero trust network access implementation

ZTNA, or Zero Trust Network Access, is a remote access security solution based on the zero trust security model and follows the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Unlike a VPN, which gives authenticated remote users full access to an enterprise network, ZTNA only allows remote users to access specific resources one at a time. With ZTNA, you can create contextual access control policies that limit a user’s privileges depending on the relative risk of that specific request. So, for example, a user connecting at 1 PM from their home office may get more ZTNA privileges than a user connecting at 1 AM from their mobile device in another country.

A ZTNA solution needs identity and access management (IAM) capabilities to authenticate users and dynamically assess their trustworthiness. For instance, ZTNA typically uses multi-factor authentication (MFA) to provide an extra layer of verification before a user can access enterprise resources. User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) are also commonly used by ZTNA because these can track account and device behavior on the enterprise network to spot anomalous behavior and provide analyses of a user’s trustworthiness.

ZTNA can be deployed as physical appliances in data centers, or you can choose an entirely cloud-based solution. Using ZTNA as a cloud service will save you from needing to purchase, configure, deploy, and manage more physical hardware, plus you’ll be closer to achieving an ideal SSE implementation by keeping more infrastructure in the cloud. In addition, purchasing IAM and ZTNA capabilities as one solution is not needed if you already have an existing IAM (or a particular vendor you wish to use)—just make sure your ZTNA and IAM support integrations with each other. Implementing ZTNA for SSE helps you bring zero trust security to your cloud and remote traffic.

Cloud access security broker implementation

A CASB, or Cloud Access Security Broker, is essentially a software gatekeeper that sits between enterprise users and cloud services. It provides visibility into how enterprise users interact with your cloud services, using technology like UEBA to detect unusual behavioral patterns and assess risk.

CASB serves numerous vital cloud security functions, including:

Implementing enterprise policies to cloud resources to enforce the same level of security on all your on-premises and cloud infrastructure equally.
Auto-discovering all cloud applications, data, and services in use so you can identify risk factors and prevent shadow IT (technology in use by your enterprise that your IT teams might not know about).
Extending data loss prevention (DLP) and data governance policies to your cloud data, to prevent the exfiltration of sensitive and proprietary data, and ensuring your enterprise complies with data privacy regulations.

As part of an SSE implementation, there are two CASB deployment modes to choose from, depending on your enterprise’s unique needs. You can use a proxy-based CASB, which is an HTTP proxy that sits between remote users and the cloud to monitor and direct traffic. Or you can use an API-based CASB, which interfaces directly with cloud and SaaS providers to inspect traffic.

Each deployment has pros and cons that need consideration with your enterprise’s goals and requirements in mind. Generally, a proxy-based CASB may cause network slowdowns because all your remote, cloud-destined traffic is funneled through a single device. Regardless, it’s still flexible considering it can work with any vendor or application. On the other hand, An API-based CASB often suffers from vendor lock-in since it integrates with a specific provider (like Microsoft 365 or Salesforce), but it causes less latency. It doesn’t require any physical or hosted hardware. Either way, deploying CASB for your SSE implementation helps monitor and protect traffic to and from your cloud services.

Secure web gateway implementation

An SWG, or Secure Web Gateway, is precisely what it sounds like—a secure gateway between your enterprise and the web. It filters malicious content from the internet and blocks dangerous user activity (like clicking unsafe links or downloading files from untrusted websites). Enterprise IT teams have been using traditional SWGs for years in physical appliances or as software running on proxy servers.

For SSE, an SWG is a cloud-based solution that can route all remote and branch office traffic to bypass your data center altogether. That means you don’t need to backhaul remote traffic through the SWG at a data center. However, you still get to apply enterprise web filtering, acceptable use policies, and internet security. Implementing an SWG for SSE allows you to treat your remote web traffic the same way as your on-premises traffic, providing consistent security across the board.

Next-generation firewall/Firewall as a service implementation

An NGFW, or next-generation firewall, improves the capabilities of a stateful firewall by providing features like cloud threat intelligence, integrated intrusion prevention, and application awareness plus control. An NGFW can be a physical appliance you deploy at the data center. Still, for an ideal SSE implementation, you should look for NGFW technology as a cloud-based service known as FWaaS or firewall as a service.

FWaaS delivers all the functionality of an NGFW, including:

Breach prevention, which uses technology such as integrated intrusion prevention, URL filtering, and built-in sandboxing to analyze viruses and other malware.
Complete network and cloud visibility with monitoring, UEBA, and automated threat analysis and remediation.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) to comprehensively analyze every data packet that passes through your network.

One of the most significant benefits of FWaaS for SSE implementations is that you won’t need to deploy many physical appliances to branch offices and data centers. Plus, you can route remote and cloud-destined traffic through a cloud firewall instead of backhauling it through a physical device, which reduces network latency. FWaaS for SSE provides all the security functionality of a physical next-generation firewall, but as a convenient cloud service.

Zero trust network access, cloud access security brokers, secure web gateways, and firewall as a service are the four key technologies needed to deploy and achieve the SSE model. However, to use SSE technology, you need to route the remote and branch office traffic to those services. This is what’s known as an access onramp, which turns SSE into SASE—secure access service edge.

Access your SSE implementation with Nodegrid

It would be best to have an access solution that seamlessly integrates with your security service edge implementation and simplifies the management of your remote network architecture, like ZPE Systems’ Nodegrid. The Nodegrid SR family of edge routers delivers vendor-neutral orchestration of your remote infrastructure so you can easily spin up and manage your SSE solutions from anywhere in the world.

Learn more about how to access your SSE implementation with Nodegrid.

Contact ZPE systems online or call 1-844-4ZPE-SYS.

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