For businesses with wide area networks, branch offices or distributed teams, networking and network security have both become top priorities — especially now that COVID-19 has made remote work the norm. Staff members connecting from outside the office need access that doesn’t compromise user experience or disrupt workflows.

“So, this acronym SASE — Secure Access Service Edge — it really is the bringing together of networking and network security both as a service,” said Sanjay Uppal (pictured, left), senior vice president and general manager of the VeloCloud Business Unit at VMware Inc. “And the exciting part about what we’re announcing at VMworld here is the expansion of the SD-WAN POPs [software-defined wide area network points of presence] and gateways into becoming SASE POPs.”

Uppal and Craig Connors (pictured, right), vice president and chief technology officer of SD-WAN at VMware, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the all-virtual VMworld 2020 event. They discussed how new tech for SD-WANs is streamlining secure networking in the age of the cloud and an increasingly distributed workforce. (*Disclosure below.)

SASE simplifies office and cloud networking during COVID

SASE is the convergence of five key areas, according to Connors. “One is this distributed POP architecture. So, how do you deliver this compute and these services near to the customers’ premises? The four key components of SASE that we have [are] zero-trust access, SD-WAN, next-generation firewalling and secure web gateway,” Connors explained.

And as the remote workforce expands, people need tools that help them connect to more and more complex networks. These solutions need to provide better latency than VPNs and support new mixed computing environments — like multicloud deployments, according to Uppal.

“Getting [multicloud] networking to work in a seamless fashion with high security can be done by an SD-WAN architecture,” Uppal stated. “And all you would need to do is add virtual services at the SASE POP. An enterprise customer would come in and they say they want some VNets here and some [virtual private clouds] there. They want to look at them in an automated fashion … and not have to do all this manual work.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2020. (* Disclosure: VMware sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE