IT and information security professionals have been bombarded with new terms and acronyms lately, and secure service edge (SSE) is the latest addition. As with all novel concepts, some are touting it as the ultimate solution to all cybersecurity problems, while others remain apprehensive. At its heart, SSE is secure access service edge (SASE) minus the “A”.
While SASE converged networking and security into a single cloud service, SSE only converges security functions, like secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), data loss prevention (DLP) and zero trust network access (ZTNA). It takes the connectivity factor — the SD-WAN and other networking functions — out of the equation, offering convergence at a different level than SASE.