The perimeter is changing. Increased use of SaaS applications along with the increasing population of users connecting to business applications from outside the corporate network are driving the change.
Hybrid Pathways facilitated a Peer Knowledge Sharing survey with IT and Security leaders, the questions were submitted by the leaders and feedback was gathered from their peers in large enterprises across multiple industries. Direct Internet Access (DIA) was a major area of concern.
Enterprises realize that the introduction of DIA along with internet-based proxy solutions offers a more consistent and scalable user experience over traditional VPNs. The challenges of DIA range from security to performance and visibility.
IT and security leaders need to be confident that DIA solutions provide the right level of performance, security and visibility before committing to widespread deployment.
40% of respondents have remote offices on their corporate network configured to provide access to trusted SaaS applications (O365, Salesforce, etc.) using direct internet access (DIA). Though 60% of enterprises do not currently support DIA, over half of them plan to add the capability over the next three years. A large majority of respondents plan to use internet-based proxy in addition to an SD-WAN solution and firewall base functionality in router code to provide the egress security controls for traffic traversing remote office DIA circuits. Many respondents consider conversion to DIA to be cost neutral with the expenditures equal to the cost savings.
Though 60% of enterprises do not currently support DIA, over half of them plan to add the capability over the next three years.
Hybrid Pathways Insight:
Enterprise companies will take a more gradual path to enabling DIA. As SD-WAN implementations become more prevalent, organizations will be able to selectively enable DIA on an application by application basis. Widespread deployment of DIA capabilities is likely 3-5 years as it will likely be tied closely to Wide Area Network refresh cycles.
The survey questions were initiated by Hybrid Pathways clients and focused on the areas of direct internet access, cloud security services, cloud access security brokering, mobile device management, Windows 10 device management, and data classification.
If you have questions you’d like to ask your peers in our next survey, please let us know.
Learn how Hybrid Pathways can help as you progress towards DIA