What is the ROI of SASE?

In today’s uncertain business environment, enterprises are scrutinizing costs across the board. Even investments in fundamental IT projects that support core business operations and security, like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), aren’t immune from pushback and cost justification. It’s natural that when budgets get tight, tough decisions must be made about where to invest for the future while rationalizing the current estate.

So, how can you help your network transformation project survive such scrutiny by the budget overlords? To start, it helps to become fluent in the language of finance.

The SASE Revolution is Here

SASE is a revolutionary approach that delivers networking and network security services as a unified, cloud-delivered solution. It represents an opportunity to unlock enormous value by optimizing existing infrastructure, removing legacy hardware, improving organizational efficiency, and ultimately generating significant financial savings.

The benefits of SASE are well-documented. Improved application performance and reliability, consistent security, better visibility and control of users, data, and apps… the list goes on and on. But what about the financial impact? We recently partnered with Forrester Consulting to determine just that.

Measuring the ROI of SASE

Palo Alto Networks commissioned the experts at Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Prisma SASE. Forrester interviewed five customers to understand the benefits and value of their investment and use of the solution.

The study analyzed the following sources of benefits to the organizations that adopted Prisma SASE:

• Efficiency Gains for the IT Security Team: IT and SecOps teams benefit from the Prisma SASE deployment through reduced number of investigations, faster mean-time-to-resolution, and fewer security issues impacting devices. Palo Alto Network’s unified platform helped IT and SecOps professionals automate previously manual processes, define better rules for alerts, and improve visibility into network traffic.
• End-user productivity improvements: End users experience fewer interruptions and less downtime with a more effective and efficient security platform. Security teams have fewer and faster interactions with end users, and they are able to solve problems remotely with Prisma SASE.
• Security tool cost reduction and avoidance: With Prisma SASE, organizations have a unified solution they can manage from a central location, allowing security teams to easily identify and close any gaps. The fidelity of the information being shared between the security systems is key to effective automated prevention of breaches and pivotal to administrators applying the proper policies across the numerous devices on and off the corporate network.
• Efficiency gains for remote worker technology solution management: Having centralized management and a single pane of glass allows IT teams to reallocate resources away from maintenance activities to higher-value tasks. Automated updates and patching, universal policy application, and reduced investigation work free up valuable resources who can now focus on improving capabilities instead of performing mundane maintenance work.
• WAN hardware and connectivity cost reduction: For Prisma SD-WAN deployments, organizations save money on both hardware and WAN connectivity costs by leveraging SD-WAN and public internet for WAN connectivity. Buying Prisma SD-WAN appliances are less expensive than the cost of replacing legacy routers used for multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), virtual private networking (VPN), and public internet, and is a significantly more cost effective investment (more than 90% in cost savings for the interviewees' organizations) and faster than traditional complex multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) connections.
• Remote site management efficiency: With Prisma SD-WAN, operations teams can apply consistent policies across the deployment from a centralized location. Additionally, branch office and in-store retail workers can leverage new applications with improved bandwidth and enhanced security at each site.

Estimate Your Own Organization’s ROI

Adopting Prisma SASE reduces risk, speeds up cloud and digital transformation, and reduces costs overall. A large enterprise can expect a return on investment of up to 270%, according to the research from Forrester, this is a strong foundation for business case justification.

For a more personalized financial picture of what SASE can offer, Forrester constructed an interactive SASE ROI calculator based on the model in the associated study and in accordance with Forrester and TEI standards. By answering a few simple questions, any organization can get an idea of the financial benefits they can expect from adopting a SASE architecture.

I recently caught up with David Holmes, senior analyst at Forrester, to discuss the market trends for SASE, what he hears in the marketplace and why organizations need a SASE solution. You can watch our full conversation here, including a deep dive on the Total Economic Impact study.