JULY - AUGUST 2025Autobusiness outlook8By Dan Constantino, Director, Security Operations, Cox AutomotiveTHE JOURNEY TO ZERO TRUSTIN MY OPINIONImagine a world where you can buy a single tool that can solve multiple security use cases, decrease tech debt and provide business value. The answer is "YES," there is a magical tool that can do this, and it is called SASE (Secure Access Service Edge).Before I talk about my team's journey into ZeroTrust, let's explorewhat could be a few common problemsyou may be looking to solve with your Zero Trust project. How tosecure the "work from anywhere" workforce, improve user experience withremote access, consolidatepoint product security solutions and lower tech debt.Today'shybrid work environmentis challenging how companies can secure their workforcewith employeesaccessingbusiness resourcesfromanywhere.It is absolutely crucial to secure the remote workforce,so they have ease of access whileproviding the same security posture regardless of where they are connecting from. Relying solely on legacy VPN technology tied to physical datacenters requires companies to backhaul their end user traffic on premise. This offers employees a less than ideal network connection experience, so why not point them directly to the cloud and improve their accessibility. Most organizations maintaina large collection of point products which requireconsolidation, so why not bring them together in a cloud-native solution and decommission legacy on prem security solutions.The technology to solve these and many other challenges is SASE.SASE is the convergence of Securityasaservice and Networkasaservice in a cloud-native security stack. The capabilities include but are not limited toweb filtering, threat protection, sandboxing, firewalling, CASB (Cloud access security broker), UEBA (Userandentity behavior analytics), FWaaS (Firewallasaservice) and ZTNA (Zero trust network access)and will depend on the solution provider.This technology is quite costly due to the many use cases it can solveandthat itdoes not require any hardware to rack, stack and configure.How do you proceed from here?While this maysound great from a security perspective but how can you obtain funding for this project from the C-suite. The first step is to build your business case to include the value the solution provides and thebusiness outcomes it improves. There are multiple dimensions to this, so I'll do my best to simplify the approach. First and foremost, this technology can replace legacy firewalls, VPNs, SDWAN (software defined wide area networking) --so I'd recommend building an inventory of what can be replaced and how much these devices cost to own, manage and maintain.This should be part of your cost justification for the purchase. It should be noted thatsavings on theproject will take time,and you
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