In today’s dynamic business environment, every line item of spending is carefully scrutinized. Even investments in foundational IT projects that support core business operations and security, like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), aren’t immune from pushback and cost justification. It’s only natural that when budgets get tight, tough decisions need to be made about where to invest for the future while rationalizing the current estate.
So, how can you help your network transformation project survive such scrutiny by the budget overlords? You can start by speaking their language.
The SASE Revolution Has Arrived
SASE is a revolutionary approach that delivers both networking and network security services as a unified, cloud-delivered solution. It represents an opportunity to unlock enormous value by optimizing existing infrastructure, removing legacy hardware, improving organizational efficiency, and ultimately generating significant financial savings.
The benefits of SASE are well-documented. Improved application performance and reliability, consistent security, better visibility and control of users, data, and apps… the list goes on and on. But what about the financial impact? We recently partnered with Forrester Consulting to determine just that.
Measuring the ROI of SASE
Palo Alto Networks commissioned the experts at Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Prisma SASE. Forrester interviewed five customers to understand the benefits and value of their investment and use of the solution.
The study analyzed the following sources of benefits to the organizations that adopted SASE:
- Efficiency Gains for the IT Security Team: IT and SecOps teams benefit from SASE through a reduced number of investigations, faster mean-time-to-resolution, and fewer security issues impacting devices. The unified platform helps IT and SecOps professionals automate previously manual processes, define better rules for alerts, and improve visibility into network traffic.
- End-user productivity improvements: End users experience fewer interruptions and less downtime with a more effective and efficient security platform. Security teams have fewer and faster interactions with end users, and they are able to solve problems remotely with SASE.
- Security tool cost reduction and avoidance: With SASE, organizations have a unified solution they can manage from a central location, allowing security teams to easily identify and close any gaps. The fidelity of the information being shared between the security systems is key in effective automated prevention of breaches and pivotal to administrators to being able to apply the proper policies across the numerous devices on and off the corporate network.
- Efficiency gains for remote worker technology solution management: Having centralized management and a single pane of glass allows IT teams to reallocate resources away from maintenance activities to higher-value tasks. Automated updates and patching, universal policy application, and reduced investigation work free up valuable resources who can now focus on improving capabilities instead of performing mundane maintenance work.
- WAN hardware and connectivity cost reduction: For SD-WAN deployments, organizations save money on both hardware and WAN connectivity costs by leveraging SD-WAN and public internet for WAN connectivity. Buying SD-WAN appliances is less expensive than the cost of replacing legacy routers used for multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), virtual private networking (VPN), and public internet, and is a significantly more cost effective investment (more than 90% in cost savings for the interviewees' organizations) and faster than traditional complex multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) connections.
- Remote site management efficiency: With SD-WAN, operations teams are able to apply consistent policies across the deployment from a centralized location. Additionally, branch office and in-store retail workers can leverage new applications with improved bandwidth and enhanced security at each site.
Estimate Your Own Organization’s ROI
Adopting SASE reduces risk, speeds up cloud and digital transformation, and reduces costs overall. A large enterprise can expect a return on investment of up to 270%, according to the research from Forrester, this is a strong foundation for business case justification.
For a more personalized financial picture of what SASE can offer, Forrester constructed an interactive SASE ROI calculator based on the model in the associated study and in accordance with Forrester and TEI standards. By answering a few simple questions, any organization can get an idea of the financial benefits they can expect from adopting a SASE architecture.
I recently caught up with David Holmes, senior analyst at Forrester, to discuss the market trends for SASE, what he is hearing in the marketplace and why organizations need a SASE solution. You can watch our full conversation here, including a deep dive on the Total Economic Impact study.
Jason Georgi serves as Palo Alto Networks' global Field CTO for Prisma Access and Prisma SASE. He focuses on building C-level relationships and advising client executives on the strategic alignment of cloud-delivered security solutions as enablers of customers' cloud transformation journey.