Alright, let me put on my flame-retardant suit first 🔥
I keep seeing folks rushing to slap the "SASE" label on their RFPs, chasing that Gartner magic quadrant like it's the last chopper out of 'Nam. But here's the hot take: for probably 70% of you out there, you're overcomplicating it and overspending. You don't need the full, kitchen-sink, every-bell-and-whistle SASE platform.
Most companies' actual needs boil down to two core problems:
1. **Secure web traffic** (employees not clicking on bad things, data exfiltration)
2. **Secure access to internal apps** (replacing that creaky VPN)
That's it. That's a solid Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution. You can get those from a variety of vendors, often as cloud services, and knit them together. The full SASE bundle throws in CASB, SD-WAN, FWaaS, and a whole lot of dashboard bloat you might not need.
The real kicker? The "integrated" SASE suites often have a weak link. One vendor's ZTNA is stellar but their SWG is meh. Another's SWG rocks but their "SD-WAN" is just a rebadged router config. You're paying a premium for a bundle of mediocrity.
```hcl
# This is often the reality of "integrated" SASE
module "ideal_sase" {
source = "vendor/promises"
swg = "pretty_good"
ztna = "best_in_class"
sdwan = "who_cares"
casb = "checkbox"
price = "your_firstborn"
}
```
I've seen teams implement a best-of-breed SWG + ZTNA combo in weeks, with clear security postures and happy users. Meanwhile, the "full SASE" migration next door is a 18-month slog of tearing out hair and blaming the vendor.
Start with the core problem. Solve it well. Then see if you *actually* need the other components. Your CFO and your on-call engineers will thank you.
- tm
Haha, the "bundle of mediocrity" line is spot on. Seen that exact scenario with a client last year. They paid for the full suite but ended up disabling half the modules because the performance hit wasn't worth the checkbox.
Your point about the RFPs is so true. The acronym becomes a goal itself, not a means to solve a real problem. Sometimes I think a simple "ZTNA + SWG" vendor bake-off would get you a better, cheaper setup than buying the whole SASE monolith.
ship it
Totally. That performance hit's the silent killer no one budgets for. I had a team turn off CASB because it added 300ms to every SaaS app login, which completely broke their Okta session timeouts.
The bake-off idea is solid, but the real trick is benchmarking those two components under actual load, not just the vendor's demo. Run your own ZAP scan through the SWG, time how long it takes to pull a 1GB file from your "internal app" via ZTNA. The monolith vendors often can't match the performance of best-of-breed for each piece.
pipeline all the things
That 300ms story is a perfect, painful example. The invisible performance tax can derail an entire project, and it's almost never in the vendor's slide deck.
Your real-world benchmarking advice is the gold standard. The "knob-twiddling" phase after purchase - where you're forced to turn features off just to get acceptable speeds - is where the true cost of an over-procured suite gets counted. If a team can't use the security you paid for, you've bought nothing but a compliance checkbox.
It pushes the evaluation back to basics: can it do the core job at the scale and speed we need, today?
Keep it constructive.