When you’re cooking up a new recipe, chances are you’re going to head off to the shop for the ingredients. If you’re lucky, the planets will align and your local supermarket will stock them all. On the other hand, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of realizing that you’ll need to make multiple stops to get everything you need.

Don’t compromise

Cooking analogies aside, it’s important to note the significance of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution provided by a single vendor. Consolidation of networking and security is a central principle of SASE that simplifies the delivery of consistent security and quality of experience (QoE), and delivers valuable other benefits, such as:

• Reduction in complexity and costs
• End-to-end observability from a device all the way to the application server it’s accessing and everywhere in between—including the internet
• Agility to adopt new digital business models

Compromising on consolidation will reduce the technical effectiveness of a SASE solution as well as diminish its overall impact. It stands to reason that an effective SASE solution that is truly consolidated can only be provided by a single vendor.

As I discussed in my previous blog post, a complete SASE solution is technically not available yet. However, there is a “supermarket” where all the ingredients are readily available today, and they are all of the highest, market-leading quality—Cisco. This didn’t happen by chance. For the past 36 years, Cisco has worked with hundreds of thousands of companies to build the network that powers their business. Over the years, we’ve also worked closely with those same companies to bring products and solutions to market that will help them succeed tomorrow, and the acquisition of Meraki is an example of Cisco’s forward-looking technology planning.

The art of consolidation

Cisco Meraki plays a pivotal role in the Cisco SASE solution. Meraki has already converged SD-WAN, networking, security, (and even IoT) onto one platform. Not just any platform though—one that has been at the vanguard of the industry since day one, built on a foundation of over a decade’s worth of experience, meticulously building and honing the industry’s most trusted cloud platform.

Compared to the market at large, the Meraki platform enables the most complete and best-in-class SASE solution available:

• Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki is the outright market leader in SD-WAN, trusted by over 20,000 organizations across all verticals and geographies
• Agile on-premises or Cisco Umbrella cloud security informed by the world-renowned security organization, Cisco Talos
• A clear road map to delivering as-a-service consistency anywhere through a global network of cloud security points of presence (PoP)—coming soon

Start your SASE journey today—with Meraki

Wherever your starting point may be, the Meraki platform takes complexity out of every step of your SASE journey with open APIs for seamless integration across Cisco technologies and third-party systems. Experience SASE first-hand with a free trial of the Meraki MX Security & SD-WAN appliances. Boasting a powerful punch, highlights of the MX appliances include:

• SD-WAN with advanced analytics that monitor and allow QoE remediation at-a-glance
• Integration with best-in-class cloud security stack with Cisco Umbrella
• Integrated on-premises unified threat management (UTM)
• True zero-touch provisioning and management through a web interface or API

Our vision is to deliver best-in-class security and experience for any workload, from anywhere, in the simplest way imaginable. Sounds… quite SASE.