SASE technology evolves toward AI-operated networking and converged security

The landscape of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is evolving from converged architectures toward AI-operated networking. While SASE initially solved the problem of backhauling traffic to central data centers by unifying SD-WAN and Security Service Edge (SSE) in the cloud, the resulting operational scale has created new management challenges.

Cisco has introduced Cisco Secure Access, a converged cloud security SSE solution grounded in zero trust. This platform integrates several core modules, including Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and Firewall as a Service (FWaaS). It further incorporates data loss prevention, DNS security, and Talos threat intelligence to provide secure access regardless of protocol or port.

The next phase of this technology involves AI-operated SASE. In this model, AI agents move beyond simple assistance to actively observe traffic, reason about risk, and automatically optimize network paths, tune policies, and remediate incidents. This transition shifts the role of human operators from manual configuration to setting high-level goals and approving significant actions.