There are any number of different approaches that an organization can take to help improve security — so why choose secure access service edge (SASE)?

Executives from Elevance Health and CSCDGR (Conseil scolaire catholique de district des Grandes Rivières) recently participated in a virtual roundtable hosted by Netskope to discuss their SASE implementations. Both organizations were recognized as winners of Netskope's SASE Transformation Awards for their adoption efforts.

Moderated by former Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa, now an advisory board member at Netskope, the panel delved into the drivers, challenges and lessons learned from securing large and small distributed environments with a unified SASE framework.

Scott Allen, director of cloud security at Elevance Health, explained the healthcare provider's mandate to reduce costs and enable a zero-trust networking model prompted their SASE evaluation. With over 100,000 users across many acquisitions, Elevance Health has a lot to protect.

The path to SASE was not a straight line for Elevance Health. Allen said his organization started out using cloud access security broker (CASB) technology to help initially secure a growing cloud deployment. He noted that over the last three years, Elevance Health has been on a journey building on top of CASB with other advanced capabilities as it looks to achieve a full SASE deployment.

Allen explained that moving from a legacy VPN to SASE, which limits access to only the specific applications and services that users need, helps to dramatically reduce Elevance Health's attack surface.

Rachel Roeder, executive advisor of cloud and enterprise architecture at Elevance Health, highlighted the extensive planning that was required due to the deployment's immense scale. Standardized documentation, testing procedures and governance processes were vital to integrate subsidiaries and maintain control as the SASE architecture expanded annually. She said communication played a key role in socializing the initiative throughout the large organization.

While Elevance Health is a large organization, CSCDGR, a French Catholic School district in Ontario, Canada, is not. "By their very nature, they have limited resources, nevertheless, they strive for a world class-leading approach to security," moderator Skorupa said. "And they've transformed their network to enable the entire student and staff population of 6,400 users and more than 7,000 devices to securely work, teach and learn from anywhere."

François Sauvé, IS supervisor at CSCDGR, emphasized the SASE platform's seamlessness that avoided disrupting lessons. The deployment had minimal budget impact as the district was able to benefit from cost reductions by modernizing its perimeter.

Richard Fecteau, IT service director at CSCDGR, noted the project’s driving factors were securing students in the digital world and maintaining network integrity from threats. Their SASE deployment allowed safe remote learning anywhere.

"The implementation of SASE allowed our students to do online learning in a secure fashion and ensure that they had the same security at home as they do at school," Fecteau said.