Organizations with geographically distributed workforces face a critical challenge: providing secure, low-latency access to applications without routing all traffic through centralized data centers. Traditional hub-and-spoke network architectures create latency bottlenecks and degrade user experience, forcing a trade-off between security and performance. This post explores how you can use AWS Local Zones and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions to eliminate that trade-off. You will learn key design principles, implementation strategies, and technical considerations for deploying SASE solutions at the edge.
We’ve seen that understanding your user locations and traffic volumes up front helps you make effective design decisions. SASE solutions require virtual security appliances such as firewalls, secure web gateways, and zero trust network access (ZTNA) connectors. You deploy these appliances close to end users so that traffic inspection does not add latency to the user experience. With AWS Local Zones, you can deploy these virtual security appliances from AWS Marketplace closer to end users. When you architect SASE solutions using Local Zones, you need to address several key technical challenges.
Latency requirements: When end users are far away from an AWS Region, applications requiring security inspection experience significant latency overhead that affects overall performance and user experience. Geographic coverage : In some cases, workforces are spread across distributed locations far from an AWS Region. You need solutions that deliver consistent service quality and security capabilities to users across your covered locations. Hybrid connectivity : Many applications maintain dependencies on on-premises data centers in areas far away from an AWS Region.
Design traffic routing carefully to avoid unnecessary network paths and reduce traffic hairpinning or network flapping. Security consistency : Implement uniform security controls across all distributed locations while maintaining performance. This requires consideration of service placement and routing architecture. Before looking at the SASE-specific design, it helps to understand what Local Zones provide. The following diagram shows how Local Zones extend AWS infrastructure from the Region out to metropolitan areas closer to end users. Figure 1: High-level AWS infrastructure diagram showing how Lo