• by Admin

The Perimeter Is Gone. Your SASE Needs to Catch Up.

A Perimeter With No Edges

A decade ago, a company's network had a clear shape. Staff came to the office, applications lived in a data center, and a firewall stood at the door. Today a sales rep logs in from a hotel, a developer works from home, a branch office runs half its tools in the cloud, and somewhere in the background an AI assistant is calling an external service on someone's behalf.

Try drawing the perimeter around that. There is nothing left to draw it around.

For Indonesian companies with branches on different islands, partners in other cities and staff who move between sites all week, that blurred perimeter is already part of daily operations, not a future scenario.

The Patchwork Problem

Most organizations responded the way you would expect: by adding tools. A secure web gateway here, a VPN there, a separate product for cloud access, another for branch connectivity. Each one solved a real problem. Together they created a new one. Policies are written in five places, visibility is split across five consoles, and when something looks wrong, nobody can see the whole path from the user to the application.

That is the gap the newer thinking about SASE tries to close. Networking and security come together as one service that travels with the user, so the same rules apply whether someone is at headquarters or at an airport gate. Fortinet's argument for unified SASE is that the AI era raises the stakes on this, because traffic to AI tools and cloud apps needs to be seen and controlled just like everything else.

What to Look For

The simplest test is whether you can answer three questions from one place: who is accessing what, from where, and under which policy. If the honest answer involves opening several dashboards and comparing notes, the architecture is probably still a patchwork.

A second test is how the design treats trust. Access that is granted once at login and never questioned again belongs to the old model. Access that is checked against identity and context, continuously, is closer to what today's work demands.

One Policy That Follows Your People

This is the gap Perkom and Fortinet like to close. FortiSASE brings secure web access, zero trust access and cloud security together as one service with a single policy set, so the same rules apply whether someone is in the head office, at home or on a train between cities. It also fits alongside Fortinet firewalls and branch networking you may already run, which keeps the move manageable.

Perkom usually suggests starting with the sites or user groups where the patchwork hurts most, then expanding from there. If your team is tired of reconciling five dashboards, a conversation about consolidation may be worth an hour.

Author: Ghea Devita, Marketing Communication PT Perkom Indah Murni