Conducting business has become an uphill battle across industries around the world, more so than ever before. Yet organisations are still responsible for enabling their own remote workforce, protecting data, defending against cyber-threats, and reducing costs.

Unfortunately, enterprises that manage disjointed security solutions experience myriad unnecessary financial costs tied to operational bottlenecks, high management costs, and more.

But by leveraging a comprehensive security platform, organisations can block threats and prevent leakage for all interaction between endpoints, devices and apps.

Consequently, enterprises can reduce costs by replacing a number of point products with a selected total cloud security platform. A secure access service edge (SASE) offering provides comprehensive security for every interaction and can be managed in the cloud from a single dashboard.

A three-in-one solution is needed to achieve this.

The first element is a secure web gateway (SWG), with traffic decryption and inspection taking place directly on users' endpoints. Next is a multi-mode cloud access security broker (CASB) that provides visibility, control and zero-day threat protection as users access managed cloud applications. Finally, agentless zero trust network access (ZTNA) secures access to internal applications.

Consolidating tools into a single platform is highly effective when it comes to ROI. Unfortunately, organisations often overlook architecture when considering cost-effective security solutions.

The solution described above eliminates the need for on-premises hardware appliances from multiple vendors, saving enterprises considerable sums of money. Organisations must be aware of the additional maintenance costs (employee time, upgrade requirements, and overhead expenses) associated with antiquated, appliance-based solutions.

Unfortunately, other architectures claim to be cloud-native when in fact they are merely housed in private data centers. This means they still adhere to what is essentially an on-premises network model.

Consequently, security vendors whose solutions are built in this way must maintain these data centers and continuously stock them with hardware appliances for their customers.

The high costs of maintaining data centers ultimately are passed on to customers--not to mention that network hops to appliances and private data centers also disrupt business continuity.

Further challenges faced by these traditional architectures are downtime and lack of scalability.

The rack-and-stack approach of buying more boxes to increase capacity for customers is reactive and creates operational bottlenecks that disrupt business processes. This occurs when organisations are waiting to install or upgrade to new appliances, or while they are waiting for their security providers to increase capacity at their data centers.

SASE providers that deploy in the public cloud provide infinite scalability on the fly. In this way, their technology avoids maintaining its own data centers, is able to focus on creating innovative security technology, and can pass those savings on to their customers.

Solutions that crash and experience downtime inhibit business continuity and ultimately affect an enterprise's bottom line. By eliminating interruptions to business operations, enterprises are able to save time and money.

To do so, look for a multi-faceted SASE solution that is deployable, scalable, performant and easy to manage, yet yields critical cost savings to organisations in a highly remote, cloud-first world.