The SASE platform was technically flawless. The network was secure. Access was smooth. Performance was stable. So why did the board cut the digital transformation budget the following year?

In the world of modern enterprise IT, few acronyms have captured the imagination quite like SASE — Secure Access Service Edge. The promise is compelling: simplified architecture, improved performance, unified security. But like many powerful solutions, SASE is not immune to strategic misalignment.

It started, as so many stories do, with good intentions and bad habits.

The breach wasn’t the result of advanced persistent threats or zero-day exploits. It wasn’t some masterstroke of technical wizardry. It began with a spreadsheet, a routine process, and a series of very human mistakes—each small on its own, but together enough to unlock the front door of an organisation.

This is the story of how a fictional—but very plausible because it’s based somewhat on a real-world example—security incident unfolded inside a mid-sized professional services firm, and how the right architecture—specifically a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) approach—could have disrupted the sequence of events before any real damage was done.

The real challenge of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) isn’t choosing a technology — it’s scaling change across a complex, dynamic organisation.

That’s why a well-executed pilot is only the beginning. To realise value at scale, you need a phased rollout strategy — one that breaks down ambition into actionable steps, balances stability with agility, and ensures that security, performance, and user experience improve together.

Too often, technology leaders face pressure to deliver everything at once. But SASE isn’t just a set of capabilities to turn on — it’s a convergence of security, networking, identity, and operations. A “big bang” approach increases risk, slows learning, and overwhelms teams.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) promises long-term transformation — but no successful transformation starts with a big-bang rollout. The path from strategy to adoption is best travelled in deliberate, manageable steps.

That’s where the pilot comes in.

A well-scoped pilot lets you validate assumptions, build internal confidence, and surface any technical, cultural, or operational issues before you scale. But too often, organisations either overreach with pilots that try to “do it all”, or underdeliver with setups that don’t show real value.

When leaders talk about Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), the conversation often starts with platforms, capabilities, or vendors. But the most important architecture in your SASE programme isn’t built in the cloud — it’s built in the organisation.

It’s your people.

SASE is not a point solution. It’s a convergence of networking and security disciplines. It spans user experience, performance, risk, governance, and operations. No single team owns all of that — which is why cross-functional collaboration is essential.

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offers a transformative vision — converging network and security functions into a unified, cloud-native architecture. It promises simplicity, agility, and a future-proof foundation for modern enterprise connectivity.

But every journey needs a starting point.

Before defining your SASE future state, you need a grounded understanding of where you stand today. That means assessing not just your technologies, but your architecture, operating model, risks, and readiness across people and process.

In the world of enterprise IT, it’s all too easy to fall in love with a new architecture. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is one of those — a sweeping transformation that promises to unify security and networking, enable Zero Trust, improve performance, and reduce complexity.

But here’s the hard truth: none of that matters if it doesn’t solve a real business problem.

The most successful SASE programmes don’t begin with selecting a platform, comparing vendors, or rolling out pilots. They begin with a clear understanding of why the business needs to evolve, where it needs to operate more effectively, and how security and connectivity must enable that change.

When organisations embark on the journey to adopt Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), performance is typically high on the list of expected benefits. The vision is clear: a seamless user experience across regions, consistent security without bottlenecks, and high availability for hybrid and remote users alike.

But as with many transformations, reality can fall short of expectations.

As deployments scale, leaders often encounter performance variability — differences in speed, reliability, or availability that can affect users, regions, or services in inconsistent and unpredictable ways. These challenges are often subtle but disruptive, impacting trust, adoption, and business continuity.

One of the central promises of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is policy-driven control — consistent, context-aware access and security policies, applied seamlessly across users, devices, locations, and applications.

But many organisations quickly discover that implementing this vision is anything but simple.

As businesses adopt SASE, they’re often confronted with a tangled web of legacy access rules, fragmented identity systems, overlapping security policies, and inconsistently enforced governance. Far from delivering simplicity, policy and access management becomes one of the most challenging areas to unify.

As organisations move toward Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), the goal is often to simplify — to consolidate security and networking capabilities into a unified, cloud-native model that’s easier to manage, scale, and secure.

Yet ironically, many find that the early stages of SASE adoption introduce new complexity, particularly in the form of vendor sprawl.

With networking and security traditionally managed in separate silos — and a market crowded with feature-rich but overlapping solutions — leaders often face a maze of options, partners, contracts, and integration points.