Managed SASE

Security built around your office network stops at the door. SASE, or Secure Access Service Edge, moves it onto the user instead, so the same protection applies whether they’re at their desk, at home or on the move. LIMA handles the design, the rollout and the ongoing changes, across both Cisco and Fortinet.

The office guarantee stops at the door

A well-built office network gives your people a guaranteed experience. They arrive, everything works, and the security controls you’ve invested in apply to everything they do.

Step outside and it’s a different story. A coffee shop, customer site, or home office: different network, different equipment, none of it yours. The traditional answer was a VPN, connecting the user back to the firewall.

It works, but it doesn’t scale well. The VPN is delivered by the firewall, which has physical limits. How many remote users you can serve is determined by how much you spent on the hardware. It also creates an obvious performance problem: a user in Sydney connecting back to a firewall in Salford to reach a service hosted in Sydney.

Why choose SASE?

With SASE, the user’s device connects to the vendor’s global infrastructure rather than to your building. Security policy is applied on the device, so it’s identical whether the user is in head office, at home or on the other side of the world. Internet traffic then leaves through the vendor’s network, which holds large direct connections into the platforms your people work in.

The practical outcome is that the user’s location stops being a variable. The experience and the controls are consistent wherever they may be.

SASE is not inherently more secure than a well-designed office network. But it does secure the user in more situations. In the traditional model, your protection is tied to where someone is. With SASE, it goes where they go.

Accredited vendor partnerships

The benefits

Managed SASE or Managed Firewall?

For most organisations the choice comes down to how their people work.

The two also work together. Adopting SASE doesn’t remove the need for internet connectivity or a firewall at each office, but that firewall no longer has to carry the full security feature set, because the controls now sit with the user. That is where the cost balance shifts, and is worth thinking about before your next infrastructure refresh.

Managed Firewall suits organisations with defined locations where most people work, plus occasional remote workers. Costs are fixed per site and sized to your headcount. A manufacturer whose staff have to be on site to do the job gets very little from a per-user model.

Managed SASE suits organisations with nomadic users, multiple regions or no meaningful office at all, where a consistent standard of protection has to apply to every user every day. It is priced per user with a professional services charge for the rollout.

Why choose LIMA for SASE

SASE is a platform provided by the manufacturer, so this is a shared responsibility model rather than the full end-to-end ownership that comes with Managed Firewall.

We own the configuration, the rollout, the ongoing changes and the first line of investigation. Where a fault sits inside the vendor’s platform, we triage it, evidence it and drive it through Cisco or Fortinet on your behalf. You still deal with us.