Like the proverbial frog in the pot, IT teams are being boiled today by the multitude of security and networking systems from diverse vendors and cloud providers that their organizations have slowly accumulated over the years.
Each point solution may have been added carefully at the time to address a distinct need or add a desired capability, but the resulting patchwork contributes its own measure of security risk due to integration gaps and inconsistent policy enforcement in the context of a mix of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments across their WAN, LAN, cloud and data center networks. To add insult to injury, this complexity has left organizations trapped in a legacy of high administrative overhead and inflated indirect and direct costs, from the extra time spent managing multiple systems and management interfaces to the need for more software licenses, bandwidth, and support.
This reality has been driving the market for Unified SASE solutions, which are well documented to offer radical simplification and increased agility by making the capabilities of separate networking and security products features into a unified platform. But when developed from the ground up, these platforms not only offer better networking and security performance outcomes, they deliver lower Total Cost of Operations (TCO) through improved operational consistency, reduced management complexity, and lowered operational and infrastructure costs.
How Unified SASE Delivers Cost Savings
Savings with Unified SASE platforms go beyond just simplified infrastructure and licensing; they include less time spent on management and troubleshooting, consolidated infrastructure, and lower energy consumption. There are also significant indirect (but real) cost savings from improved security. The Top 10 key savings categories as a result of a Unified SASE approach are:
- Deployment, Patching & Configuration Management – Managing the deployment, upgrading, configuration, and patching of multiple disconnected security and networking systems breeds operational complexity, increases risk, and drains resources. But by unifying the capabilities of next-gen firewalls, SD-WAN, and a gamut of security products, operational tasks become simpler and faster. Uniform zero-touch provisioning is among the many bonuses of a unified platform, reducing deployment time and expense.
- System Integration and Development – Integrating disparate networking and security systems often requires API-level integrations and maintenance when any component changes. This can lead to higher operational overhead, visibility gaps, and inconsistent enforcement. Significant savings can be realized through reduced development time and integration efforts.
- SD-WAN Network Consolidation – Since transport is typically the biggest expense of network OpEx, using SD-WAN to consolidate networks and eliminate MPLS circuits represents significant operational savings. SD-WAN can securely route traffic over wireless connections and lower-cost broadband without impacting performance. This also reduces the burden of network administration.
- Incident Troubleshooting – A multi-product, multi-vendor environment requires jumping between consoles, correlating logs manually, and addressing issues across disconnected systems when troubleshooting incidents. With integrated data and context across security and networking, it becomes faster to pinpoint the root cause of incidents and reduce false positives. Faster troubleshooting across products, reduction in false positives, and higher detection accuracy are all important benefits for Unified SASE platforms.
- Policy Creation and Updating – Centralized security policy definition and application also eliminate swivel-chair management and reduce hours needed to maintain and update policies.
- Licensing Management Simplification – Managing multiple licensing agreements results in administrative overhead, budgeting uncertainty, and compliance risk. Each tool or appliance typically has its own renewal cycle, support terms, usage metrics, and contractual obligations. This results in difficulty tracking entitlements, forecasting costs, and ensuring alignment with evolving business needs. This often leads to overprovisioning, missed renewals, and increased legal or audit exposure. A consolidated platform and unified licensing model simplify software licensing, support contracts, and procurement management.
- License Consolidation – Disparate systems increase direct costs with separate licenses for each fragmented networking and security tool. Each point solution increases spending due to built-in vendor overhead to cover sales, deployment, maintenance, training, and administrative costs. A Unified SASE platform consolidates these product functions into a single solution with a streamlined licensing model, eliminating redundancies and lowering TCO.
- Infrastructure Consolidation – Converging the capabilities into a single infrastructure results in savings by eliminating hardware and software for routers and security products, including any MPLS router, LTE router, VPN, ZTNA, NGFW, DLP, SWG, and CASB. This results in significantly reduced hardware maintenance and support costs.
- Energy Consumption Reduction – Shrinking the hardware footprint (routers, SD-WAN and firewall appliances) by consolidating on-premises and WAN edge components can result in a reduction in power consumption and expense.
- Audit and Compliance – A single Unified SASE management portal consolidates multiple dashboards and reporting systems, streamlining audit and compliance checks and significantly reducing total hours of administration.
Platforms, Not “Platformized”
As with many new technologies, some SASE solutions have been created organically, built-for-purpose from the ground up. Other SASE solutions have evolved from vendors combining separate security and network products or acquiring them through M&A activity. This is a process referred to as “platformization.”
The challenge with “platformized” bundles is that they continue to share the operational downsides of separate products and fail to realize the simplicity, agility, and synergies of an organically built Unified SASE platform, whose capabilities can even extend to SD-LAN, delivering consistent performance and policy across the entire infrastructure.
To unlock the full value of Unified SASE, an implementation needs native unified capabilities and a single management console. A Unified SASE platform should have a single operating system, a single management platform, a single point of control to deploy and monitor all security policies, a single management system for monitoring and troubleshooting, and a single integrated data lake for analytics and data storage. It should also deliver these services on-premises, from the cloud, or in a hybrid mode across the WAN, LAN, cloud, remote clients, and data centers while maintaining a single console.
Conclusion
Unified SASE drives TCO savings across product, operations, and management by consolidating the capabilities of diverse security and networking products. Separate security products often have overlapping feature sets, a cost inefficiency eliminated in a single platform. Operational tasks—such as deployment, patching, and policy management—become simpler and faster in a unified solution, reducing the manual effort tied to maintaining separate systems. Troubleshooting is more efficient as well, since there are fewer tools and consoles to navigate. In addition, managing licenses, support contracts, and compliance reporting are less time-consuming when everything runs through a single platform and one vendor. These savings reduce costs, free up time, and streamline day-to-day work. The benefits are most clearly realized when the platform has been organically developed as a single software system and architecture and is not a “bolted together” version of separate products.
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