The explosive growth of cloud-native services (SaaS, IaaS) and the widespread adoption of hybrid work environments have radically expanded the traditional corporate IT perimeter, rendering legacy, boundary-based on-premises security architectures ...
The explosive growth of cloud-native services (SaaS, IaaS) and the widespread adoption of hybrid work environments have radically expanded the traditional corporate IT perimeter, rendering legacy, boundary-based on-premises security architectures obsolete. Organizations relying on traditional perimeter security increasingly face severe structural limitations, including network bottlenecks caused by traffic backholing, fragmentation of disparate security policies, and a critical deficiency in integrated visibility.
While Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) have emerged as paradigm-shifting solutions to address these vulnerabilities, existing maturity models and guidelines remain largely abstract or theoretical, failing to provide actionable, structured migration roadmaps for enterprises with deeply entrenched legacy infrastructures.
To bridge this gap, this study proposes a practical, lifecycle-oriented "Cloud-based SASE Transition Framework" designed to guide organizations safely and systematically from on-premises environments to cloud-native security architectures. The proposed framework structurally operationalizes the core tenets of zero trust by establishing a rigorous four-stage lifecycle “Diagnosis and Analysis”, “Strategic Planning”, “Implementation and Migration”, and “Optimization and Operation”
In the initial stages, the framework quantifies the organization's current security posture through comprehensive asset/traffic identification and maturity gap analysis based on domestic and international standards (such as KISA Zero Trust Guideline 2.0 and NIST SP 800-207).
In the planning and implementation phases, it eliminates implicit trust zones by mapping granular security capabilities onto application-level micro-segmentation policies, while mandating a hybrid co-existence deployment strategy to guarantee uninterrupted business continuity.
Finally, the optimization phase integrates SIEM and SOAR automation to minimize the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and establish continuous context-based monitoring.
To validate the multi-dimensional efficacy and economic feasibility of the proposed framework, a cross-verification analysis was conducted utilizing empirical, quantitative indicators from leading global research institutions (e.g., Forrester Consulting and IDC).
The evaluation demonstrates that the systematic vendor consolidation orchestrated by the framework yields a 75% increase in operational efficiency for security and network management teams, alongside a 50% reduction in the mathematical probability of data breaches.
Furthermore, by transitioning to a Direct-to-Cloud routing architecture, the framework effectively eliminates traffic backholing and data center bottlenecks, optimizing bandwidth utilization and significantly reducing expenditures related to high-cost Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) circuits and legacy hardware maintenance.
Ultimately, this research provides enterprises with a scientifically validated governance model and a strategic execution blueprint to achieve robust, risk-mitigated security transformation in the cloud era.