Is it time for SASE? Key triggers that signal your business is ready for the switch

When VPN bottlenecks, tool sprawl, and policy exceptions start slowing business down, SASE is the engine that restores fast, consistent access everywhere. 

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is no longer an emerging technology. It’s now a roadmap item.  

For Australian organisations dealing with hybrid work, cloud sprawl and privacy obligations, SASE has become a practical way to unify networking and security. Its identity-driven access gives teams fast, safe connections to SaaS and private apps from anywhere.  

For organisations looking to maintain optimal performance, it’s a matter of when, not if, upgrading to SASE is required. Here are the clearest signs your business is ready to make the switch, and why SASE is a strategic shift in how businesses secure access. If your organisation reaches this point,   

For a quick primer, see Interactive’s overview of what SASE is.  

Why you can’t afford to delay SASE adoption

As with every business transformation, timing is everything. For starters, delaying SASE adoption can lead to compounding challenges across security, performance, and user experience. Essentially, it escalates three problems: 

• Exposure grows faster than controls. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) received 595 breach notifications in the six months to December 2024—up from 518 in the prior half. The most affected sectors were health, Australian Government, and financial services. The common contributing factors were fragmented access controls and inconsistent inspection paths – the very vulnerabilities SASE closes by design.
• Operational load keeps rising. ASD’s 2023–24 Cyber Threat Report shows 36,700 hotline calls (+12% YoY) and 1,100+ incidents responded to, highlighting the continuous pressure on security teams.
• A poor end-user experience. Experience is now a board metric. In 2025, 93% of security leaders rated Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) important in SSE/SASE. According to cybersecurity insiders, employees equate speed and reliability with security.
   

Zero Trust is now a business mandate

Australia’s best-practice and regulatory settings are pushing identity-centric access. The ASD’s Essential Eight maturity update (Nov 2023) tightened expectations on patching, hardening, and privileged access. Those controls are far easier to apply consistently when traffic is inspected and enforced in one place.  

APRA also directed superannuation (RSE) licensees to complete specific CPS 234 actions by 31 August 2025, including naming accountable persons and strengthening authentication for high-risk and privileged access. That timeline is driving programs that make strong MFA and device posture non-negotiable at scale. 

How SASE accelerates Zero Trust rollout

• Per-app, per-session access (ZTNA): SASE brokers access based on who the user is and the health of their device, segmenting by application to shrink lateral movement, aligned with NIST’s Zero Trust principles of continuous verification and least privilege.
   
• One policy, everywhere: SWG, CASB/DLP, ZTNA, and FWaaS run in a unified cloud edge, so identity- and context-based rules apply consistently across web, SaaS, and private apps, not just the corporate network.
   
• Continuous monitoring & evidence: A single control and data plane correlates user, device, and traffic logs for faster investigation and cleaner audit trails, which is useful when demonstrating CPS 234 control effectiveness.
   
• Adoption without the performance tax: Enforcing policy close to users and SaaS reduces latency, lifting the odds that stronger authentication and step-up checks are actually used day-to-day. 

Zero Trust is the strategy. SASE is the delivery platform that makes it operational at scale for hybrid work and multi-cloud environments. It also meets Australian uplift and assurance standards. 

Triggers that signal you’re ready for SASE

The triggers below are easy to miss, yet they’re classic signs you’re ready for SASE. If several ring true, your organisation is already absorbing the cost of keeping networking and security separate. 

Your remote or hybrid workforce is expanding

Australian work has settled into hybrid patterns: 36% of employed people usually worked from home in August 2024, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. That’s a sustained group that needs consistent, policy-driven access from anywhere.  

Traditional VPNs and hub-and-spoke networks struggle as this audience grows. They backhaul (a.k.a. “hairpin”) traffic by forcing internet/SaaS sessions to detour through a central data centre first, adding latency, creating single choke points, and turning routine collaboration into a support issue. The more time employees spend “working offline” due to slow VPN connections, the more revenue you’re leaving on the table. Restricting hybrid work to ease the traffic burden isn’t the answer either. It’s simply solving one problem by creating another. 

You’ve outgrown legacy VPN performance and security

As hybrid usage grows, traditional VPNs strain. Performance dips, reliability falters, and risk rises due to flat, implicit-trust networks and central choke points. 

Where legacy VPNs bite:

• Performance & reliability: Central concentrators, bandwidth and license limits become bottlenecks; video calls and SaaS traffic jitter at peak times.
• Rising security risk: Network-level tunnels expand the blast radius; split tunnelling leaves SaaS traffic uninspected, while full-tunnel saturates gateways. Credentials and lateral movement remain high-impact failure points. 
• Operational drag: Troubleshooting pinballs between path and policy, and every new site or app spawns exceptions.
• Cost & complexity: Appliance upgrades, global concentrators and overlapping tools inflate spend without improving user experience. 

What SASE upgrades

Controls move to the cloud edge near users and apps, with Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) brokering per-session, per-app access based on identity and device posture. You get one policy model across web, SaaS and private apps, better latency for Microsoft 365/Teams/Zoom/Salesforce, and a smaller blast radius when accounts or endpoints are compromised. On the flip side, traditional VPNs create flat, implicit-trust networks and brittle user experiences under load.  

Maximise the value of cloud and SaaS applications

Consider this: 90% of Australian enterprises now run multi-cloud strategies, and SaaS spend continues to expand, driving policy sprawl if controls live in multiple places. As teams spin up unsanctioned or duplicate SaaS, identities scatter across tenants, traffic bypasses inspection, and it becomes hard to answer “who has access to what, from where, and is sensitive data leaving the organisation?”  

Meanwhile, SASE consolidates web, SaaS and private-app controls into one policy model. It delivers data controls through CASB/DLP and threat controls through SWG/FWaaS, all at the edge. 

With SASE, your teams can confidently make the most out of your investments in cloud and SaaS, knowing they’ll stay secure at every turn.

Streamline security tools, while gaining capability

Organisations are juggling too many disconnected security tools, and it’s creating unnecessary inefficiencies. When every control is a separate console, agent, and data store, teams spend more time stitching than securing. Point solutions multiply the number of change windows, create policy drift, and fragment telemetry. As a result blind spots creep in, alerts lose context, and simple fixes become war-room exercises.  

But a unified SASE platform reduces that overhead by enforcing one policy model and correlating identity, device, and traffic in one place. 

The market is moving the same way. Gartner’s 2024 Single-Vendor SASE view highlights a shift toward unified platforms with one management plane and one data plane. Leaders include Palo Alto Networks, Cato Networks, and Netskope. The appeal is straightforward: enforce policy once, observe everything from branch to remote to cloud, and reduce operational risk and cost through consolidation. 

You’ve had a breach or a near miss

The average cost of a data breach in Australia hit A$4.26 million in 2024 When identity controls, segmentation, and inspection are fragmented, that cost escalates quickly.  

Post-incident reviews here routinely surface the same patterns: compromised credentials, flat VPN networks that enable lateral movement, and tool silos that slow containment.  

Cyber incidents are an architectural signal. You need integrated, identity-centric controls that  

1. verify user and device continuously,  
2. limit access to specific apps, and  
3. give your team one place to see and act on “who accessed what, from where.”  

IBM’s 2024 global study highlights the point: credential-based breaches were common and slower to detect/contain, driving higher costs over longer lifecycles. 

Meanwhile, SASE reduces blast radius through least-privilege access and consistent inline controls across user, site and cloud. 

Your user experience is suffering in multi-cloud environments

In a cloud-heavy estate, inconsistent or slow access is a red flag that the network design isn’t keeping up. As workloads spread across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and SaaS, old hub-and-spoke patterns and scattered controls introduce extra hurdles, uneven breakouts, and blind spots. When that happens, video calls jitter, SaaS pages stall, and “it’s the network” tickets start to pile up. 

Typical symptoms 

• Video/audio jitter and dropped calls at peak times 
• SaaS page loads that vary wildly by location/time of day 
• Timeouts when reaching private apps via VPN 
• Sporadic re-auth/MFA loops and session drops for remote users 

What SASE changes

• Edge enforcement near users/SaaS: decisions at cloud PoPs cut round trips and optimise performance.
   
• Per-app ZTNA, one policy: identity- and device-aware rules apply uniformly to web, SaaS, and private apps.
   
• Built-in DEM: user/device/path telemetry is correlated in one place for rapid root cause.
   
• Optimised middle mile: smart routing and direct SaaS peering reduce flaky internet paths. 

You need tighter control over identity and access management

Modern SASE is identity-first. Policies evaluate user, device, location and risk signals before granting per-app access. This strengthens IAM practices (MFA coverage, step-up auth for sensitive apps, conditional access) and supports compliance evidence for CPS 234 and Essential Eight maturity. 

With SASE, access is decided by ‘who’ the person is and whether their device is healthy, not just which network they’re on. Each time someone opens an app, SASE quickly checks identity, location, and risk, then grants access to that app only.  

If something looks off (a new device, unusual location, or a sensitive action), it can ask for extra verification or block the request. Admin access can be made time-limited and recorded, and contractors can get temporary, app-specific access that expires automatically. Everything is logged in one place so you can show who used what, from where, and on which device, which is helpful for CPS 234 assurance and Essential Eight maturity. 

Let Interactive guide your SASE transition

If the drawbacks of pre-SASE technology resonate, let us guide you through the much-needed transition. Interactive is an Australian end-to-end IT services partner trusted by 2,000+ customers to keep systems available and secure, 24/7. We make SASE practical, from first assessment to day-two operations. Our team brings leading expertise and practical experience to help you: 

• Assess readiness & build the case:
  Zero-trust/SASE readiness review mapped to Essential Eight and sector obligations (CPS 234), plus a clear outcomes roadmap. 
• Design & pilot with guardrails:
  Design for Managed SD-WAN and SSE/ZTNA, integrated with your identity provider and device health, so you can prove experience, risk, and cost outcomes. 
• Monitor, operate & continuously improve:
  24/7 Managed Security Services (SOC, SIEM/MDR) and DEM dashboards your execs can read, so gains are visible and sustained.
   

Ready to move? Book a short SASE readiness chat with Interactive and get a tailored plan for your hybrid workforce and multi-cloud environment.