Over the last few months, we’ve been pretty quiet about all the exciting projects we’ve been working on. Now, we’re finally ready to announce that we’ve joined the MEF 3.0 PoC! This project tackles the challenge of connecting remote employees with the bandwidth and services they need to be able to work efficiently and effectively from wherever they are.
COVID-19 presented many challenges, and for operators, this was a challenge faced on both fronts – connecting their employees and their customers. Most organizations were forced to move quickly, trying to find solutions that would be up and running almost instantaneously and get the job done as best as possible. Combine this frantic need and an emerging framework, and well, that breeds a lot of inconsistency.
‘SASE’ refers to the Secure Access Service Edge, and is a rising model for service delivery in modern networks. However, the SASE offerings that are currently available vary in architecture and functionalities, creating a lot of confusion and leaving out the importance of customer and cloud domains in end-to-end service assurance and security.
This PoC offers a MEF-defined SASE service for remote employee access to multiple public clouds (e.g., AWS, Azure), validating end-to-end SASE with Lean NFV management concepts and making dynamic SASE options feasible. SASE Service is established, secured, and driven by common policies over customer, service provider, security cloud, and public cloud domains. As a result, the end customer receives policy-driven, zero-trust access to multiple public cloud providers.
This joint effort demonstrates end-to-end SASE service layered on multiple SD-WANS with distributed security, orchestrated using principles of Lean NFV for greater openness, agility, disaggregation, and service innovation at the edge. We’re really excited to be a part of shaping the SASE future. Keep an eye out for more updates on this initiative!