Why shared infrastructure isn't always the safe bet it's made out to be
SASE has gained popularity quickly in recent times, and for good reason. It offers centralized control, cloud delivered security, and seamless security, and. All sounds too good to be true?
Perhaps.
For many businesses, SASE does provide the security they are looking for, at least initially. But the common misconception is that SASE must be cloud-native. The truth - SASE is a framework. And it does not have to be tied to the cloud. Additionally, like with everything else, there is a downside to cloud-only SASE as well.
Single Point of Failure on the Cloud
Most mainstream SASE vendors run on shared cloud infrastructure. The downside? When something goes wrong in that shared environment, an outage, misconfiguration, or attack, not just one tenant is affected but potentially thousands. You're entrusting your data’s safety to systems that others depend upon as well.
This kind of dependency on centralized, multi-tenant infrastructure doesn’t just increase exposure it amplifies the blast radius when things go wrong.
A telling example is the Azure Active Directory outage in 2020. A misconfiguration in Azure AD triggered a system-wide failure that prevented users from accessing key Microsoft services including Azure Portal, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 for nearly three hours. This was not the result of a cyberattack, but a simple technical error within the cloud provider’s shared infrastructure. Yet the consequences were global. Millions of organizations were simultaneously locked out of critical services, demonstrating how a single vendor-side issue can cascade across all tenants.
Zenarmor Plug & Secure Model: Resilience without the Risks
Zenarmor has a different approach. Each instance runs independently. That way, risk is contained to one tenet/instance and doesn’t travel across the network.
Shared IPs mean Shared Risks
Many SASE solutions used shared PoPs with shared public IP addresses. If one customer or system gets flagged for abuse, it results in all customers on the same IP getting affected. This can quickly snowball into something bigger - the entire IP can get blacklisted, you lose access to critical services, web traffic gets throttled, emails bounce - the works. When external services get blocked, you risk reputational harm, and your business loses credibility.
Issues like this disrupts continuity and increase user friction. You end up paying the price for someone else’s mistake, and your business suffers.
Zenarmor gives you control over your network and IP addresses
No matter where you are deployed - cloud, on-premise, or directly on the tenants, you will never have to share public IPs with other tenants. No more risk of your IP getting blocked due to someone else’s actions, and no more business disruptions.
Centralized inspection creates bottlenecks
Cloud SASE providers often route all traffic through centralized Points of Presence (PoP). While that sounds efficient, it creates new problems:
- Latency, because traffic detours through a distant PoP
- Dependency, because if the PoP goes down, your security does too
- Congestion, as inspection queues get overloaded
Zenarmor makes every device its own mini security hub
Routing all traffic through shared infrastructure and centralized Points of Presence (PoP), creating bottlenecks, increasing latency, and introducing potential single points of failure. Zenarmor takes a different path. With its Plug and Secure approach, Zenarmor delivers full security enforcement at the edge, on-premises, or directly on the endpoint without relying on a centralized cloud architecture. With Zenarmor, each device or site becomes its own inspection point. Whether it's a remote branch or a single endpoint, security happens right there.
This gives you faster performance, stronger isolation, and better resilience.
Legal and Compliance Issues
No one wants to be slapped with a regulatory fine. In the current time, regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, are coming down hard on non-compliant organisations. In recent times, many global enterprises have faced regulatory fines, to the tune of many millions - for instance, TD Bank ($3.09B) in US, Meta (€1.2B) and Amazon (€746M) in Europe - these were GDPR fines levied on companies globally, in 2024 for non-compliance.
With traditional SASE, you do not have enough visibility or control over your traffic, leaving you more vulnerable to risks.
Zenarmor processes traffic locally - within your own infrastructure
With Zenarmor, you have full control and visibility over where your traffic is inspected and stored. This makes audits and checks easier and also mitigates risks - related to data security or compliance.
Because Zenarmor is compliant by design, it gives you the following benefits:
- Data localization: you decide exactly which region or jurisdiction processes your traffic.
- Configurable data retention: customizable logs and metadata policies to meet specific regulatory or internal compliance needs.
- Zero shared infrastructure: no shared PoPs or IP pools means no unexpected data exposure.
Vendor Lock-ins Limit your Flexibility; Increase Costs
Choosing a vendor is often a time-consuming and expensive process. Once you have committed to a cloud-SASE solution, it is hard to back out - you have limited flexibility, are tied to their processes, limitations and roadmaps. As a result, it becomes hard to scale, integrate their solutions to your infrastructure and get it running.
Zenarmor is Modular, Flexible and Vendor Agnostic
You can run Zenarmor on any device or any environment, be it your private data center or public cloud. You get full API access and it integrates well with the tools you are already using.
No Single-Point-of-Failure
With cloud-only SASE, all networks go through the vendor’s infrastructure, which of course, is risky. Because no matter what ‘uptime’ your vendor guarantees, there is still a possibility of something going wrong - and if something does go wrong with the vendor’s network, your network goes down too. This creates bottlenecks, affects the overall experience, and adds to your ‘hidden cost’ of doing business.
Zenarmor is Distributed by Design
Zenarmor ensures each site or device is handled locally. The security policies and real-time inspection you need, is all built-in, giving you peace of mind. No more relying on external factors for your security and efficiency.
Cloud-Only SASE is Risky - Zenarmor Gives you the Control you Need
For all the benefits of centralization that SASE provides, it does expose your organisation to significant risks. Zenarmor flips that model on its head - it helps you achieve all the benefits of SASE - visibility, inspection, policies, without giving up control or reliability.
If you are considering adopting a SASE solution, check out how Zenarmor may do all that, and more. Speak to us today, or try it out for free, for a limited time.
