Podcast
Root Causes 120: PKI and SASE


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
September 18, 2020
SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) is a new term to describe the complexity of authenticating access across today's diverse and heterogeneous computing environments. Join our hosts as they discuss the role of digital identity and certificates in this paradigm.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
The reason why they chose the term Service Edge was so that they didn’t very specifically prescribe something like a laptop, a mobile device or an API, or an application, or an IoT device. All those things essentially become their own edge of a network. So, what used to be the definition of the edge of a network was probably your firewall or in a home environment it might be a router. In IoT environments and early IoT you might have heard the concept of a gateway. All of those things would be considered network edges. But if you look at it now, Tim, it’s kind of better to think about just about every asset you have that connects to the internet as being an edge.
And so, just to, not to belabor it but at the end of the day are there surrogates for PKI? Like would there be another approach to providing identity? Because you are gonna need identity for every device and every access point and etc. Like is PKI just sort of assumed here?
So, I think that’s a really great, crisp definition and explanation of SASE and, you know, it’s funny right when we think we’ve got our head around everything they throw a new word at us, right and now we all have to go learn the new word. But this is a useful word. This is a good word, and it has a place in the world and it’s good to just clarify where PKI sits in that conceptual framework.

