SSE and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions are well-suited to address the dynamic anywhere, anytime needs of a modern digital business and its hybrid digital workforce. But they do have limitations.

Historically, SSE environments have created blind spots. SSE providers create secure tunnels for data to traverse between users, branch offices, and their cloud-based security service. They accomplish this by blocking access to the data flowing through those tunnels.

But to maintain zero trust, security and IT teams need visibility into all network traffic, across each security domain, including cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. But with SSE, they may create workarounds to get this visibility, like using less reliable, recreated models of the traffic or deploying heavy-handed endpoint solutions that may degrade network performance, and have negative effects on SLAs and productivity. Or worse, they entirely forgo visibility into this traffic.

Gaps in an organization’s zero trust architecture due to lack of visibility can lead to hefty fines for non-compliance in highly-regulated industries. Threats can go undetected in encrypted traffic that’s otherwise authenticated, giving attackers longer dwell times to orchestrate more sophisticated campaigns, like ransomware.

In an era when cyberattacks are becoming harder to detect, outages can come from unexpected culprits, and operational resilience is becoming a regulatory imperative – gaps in visibility are unacceptable.