VMware SASE Vision
A Gestalt IT Showcase with Karl Brown of VMware on why the enterprise is no longer a perimeter-secured fortress, and what that means for how the network is secured. I sat on the delegate panel with Chris Grundemann, Jody Lemoine and Scott Bollinger.
24 August 2021 · 1 min read
Gestalt IT Showcase, sponsored by VMware. Published 24 August 2021. Presenter: Karl Brown, Senior Director of Product Marketing at VMware. Panelists: Chris Grundemann, Jody Lemoine, Scott Bollinger and me.
The premise Karl Brown opened with is the one that defined 2021 for anyone running a WAN: the enterprise is no longer the perimeter-secured fortress it used to be. Remote work and cloud infrastructure put the network everywhere, and the attack surface went with it.
The vision, and the questions
Karl leads product marketing for VMware SASE, with more than twenty years across wired and wireless, voice and data, and enterprise, vendor and service provider networks. His session laid out where VMware wanted SASE to go and how it was meant to level-set security for a distributed organization. The panel's role was to ask whether that vision matched what operators were living through.
I came to it from the WAN Dynamics side, where we had spent the spring of 2020 scaling customers onto cloud-delivered remote access because their data center firewalls could not keep up. That experience made me sympathetic to the direction and skeptical of anything that sounded like a rebrand. The test I kept coming back to is whether a user gets the same policy in the branch, at home and anywhere else.
The deeper dive is in the companion session, VMware SASE Technical Overview with Aamer Akhter. Gestalt IT's show notes are here.
