3 SSE Adoption Principles to Live By

• Broadcom product experts recently hosted the webinar, SSE: What They Won’t Tell You… But We Will.
• Overlooking certain SSE adoption fundamentals is the top reason SSE projects stall.
• Defining a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for your use cases, while factoring in often-overlooked milestones, is the most important first step in reaching your SSE goals.
• Our experts shared valuable features and capabilities relevant to every stage of your adoption journey.

Security Service Edge (SSE) transformations are complex, but they don’t have to be painful. The best way to ensure success is to go to the experts—the SSE veterans who’ve seen every misstep and triumph in the book—so that you can anticipate hurdles and set the straightest path to a smooth and successful adoption. 

We brought in Broadcom product leaders, Chris Newman, Symantec Cloud Principal Product Manager, and Nate Fitzgerald, Head of Product Management, to host a candid webinar on what enterprises actually face when adopting SSE. In SSE: What They Won’t Tell You…But We Will, our experts revealed frequently overlooked challenges and shared practical truths, unpacking learnings accumulated over years of valuable field experience to help your team immediately reduce complexity and accelerate adoption. We’ve summarized a few of the webinar’s critical takeaways below.

Stick to the Fundamentals

When it comes to Secure Service Edge (SSE), “shiny objects” can distract—and actually prevent—teams from fully reaping the rewards SSE can and should offer. In a way, this is understandable: Because SSE is constantly evolving, it makes it harder for customers to focus on what matters most.

Every year, analysts and vendors get excited about new “must-have” capabilities and technologies. While these new features are impressive, one simple truth can’t be ignored: No SSE value can materialize without a reliable, scalable data path. It’s the ground that everything in SSE rests upon. Without solid connectivity, none of these shiny new features will work properly. 

It’s no wonder so many SSE rollouts that neglect this foundation struggle. Don’t get distracted by the hype—the most transformative SSE feature is the one that gets traffic flowing securely to your cloud stack. That means making decisions early about how connectivity will work (tunnels, agents or hybrid approaches) and ensuring key elements like authentication and policy enforcement are ready to go. Get the data path right and the rest will follow.

The most transformative SSE feature is the one that gets traffic flowing securely to your cloud stack.

Nail Your MVP

Our emphasis on data path is part of a stepped approach that begins with perfectly executing SSE’s “minimum viable product” (MVP). Typically with an MVP, the goals are to get user traffic flowing, make sure DLP and authentication are working, and then—and only then—start layering on more advanced capabilities. The MVP is about narrowing your scope and focusing on getting that first meaningful win.

Your MVP should account for the real-world connectivity challenges that arise for security teams. If these aren’t addressed early, you’re setting yourself up for delays, frustration and even abandonment. Here are three challenges we see often, and what your MVP can do about it:

1. Diverse environments and agent deployment

Acquisitions, geographic differences and legacy systems create a diverse environment for enterprise security teams to manage. That means you’ll need to plan for flexible connectivity and traffic-routing strategies upfront. Your MVP should reflect the diversity of your environment—not just your most modern or centralized users.

Deployments often struggle when there’s an assumption that a single approach will work for all users. Broadcom’s Agent Traffic Manager (ATM) feature can be leveraged here for easier control and condition-setting for mixed environments like roaming users, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and regional deployments.

2. Load balancing for multi-gig traffic 

Enterprises have very large traffic flows (think: data center backups, scaled video conferencing, large file transfers and cloud app usage) that put a strain on traditional tunnel-based architecture. These multi-gigabit workloads often exceed a single tunnel’s capacity (typically 1-2Gbps), causing latency, packet loss or failure. 

A 10-gig workload might require five to 10 tunnels with a load balancer. That’s a complex setup, and if discovered after deployment is already underway, it can cause headaches. Keep this consideration top of mind in your MVP so you’re not blindsided by infrastructure limitations. 

Meanwhile, back at Broadcom, we’re already working to make your life easier. In partnership with Google, Symantec Cloud SWG Express Connect, currently in preview, allows you to onboard 100Gbps workloads to SSE—without tunnels or load balancing.

3. Logging and SIEM integration

Another often-overlooked blocker in early SSE adoption is logging and visibility—specifically, the amount of log data generated and its management. Network and proxy logs can scale quickly, and many teams underestimate what it takes to feed that data into their Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).

If the MVP doesn’t have the proper storage and bandwidth, teams risk bottlenecks, unexpected costs and gaps in visibility. To address this, Broadcom is rolling out capabilities like event streaming and Kafka-based integrations that allow teams to manage log data more efficiently without flooding their existing tools.

Be realistic about hybrid models

The challenges we just mentioned speak to why many enterprises can’t just flip a switch and go all-in on cloud. That’s completely natural and we would never recommend forcing the issue before it makes sense for your organization. 

Although they can be complex, hybrid models are often the only practical solution for those with legacy systems and strict regulatory environments. This reality is something that teams should understand as a temporary, but necessary, stage in the journey to broader SSE adoption.

Although it would be great for all organizations to have a one-size-fits-all solution, SSE adoption must be broken down into manageable units. Start small and validate new capabilities piece-by-piece. Embrace some of the natural complexity that comes along the way in this iterative process. Broadcom intentionally supports hybrid with complexity-reducing features like Unified Policy Enforcement, offering the ability to apply a single policy across cloud and on-prem enforcement points.

Wrapping up 

SSE adoption is a massive topic and we’ve only scratched the surface here. Watch the full webinar for a deeper look at real-world deployment advice, powerful feature rollouts and honest perspectives on what it really takes to drive SSE adoption. If your organization is planning—or struggling with—a transformation, you won’t want to miss these exclusive insights.