Secure Service Edge (SSE) is a security tool running on a network service. The fact that it’s procured by a security leader, is governed by security policy, and lives inside a security console doesn’t really change what it does on the wire. It terminates tunnels, inspects traffic, influences routing, and becomes part of the application path.
Calling it a security tool doesn’t magically stop it from behaving like critical network infrastructure.
When Identity Stopped Meaning Human
Most SSE deployments were originally designed around human traffic patterns: remote workforce access, ZTNA, and SaaS access. But the environment did not stay user-centric for long.
Cloud environments are evolving away from monolithic data center replacements toward any-to-any network hubs. AI and headless interoperability are blurring the lines between dev and prod and between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS environments. Applications now communicate directly with each other through private connectivity, tunneled connections, and API gateways. In many environments, most traffic no longer originates from internal users. AI agents and workload automations only accelerate this hyperconnectivity.
This new reality creates a dangerous inconsistency: Employee traffic is inspected and policy driven; workload and API traffic largely aren’t.
If workloads, APIs, and AI agents will drive more of the overall traffic flow, why does inspection stop at the user edge?
In an attempt to maintain consistent policy enforcement, some organizations have tried to extend SSE to cloud workload egress, cloud-to-cloud communication, and cloud-to-SaaS access. SSE isn’t the right tool for this job; cloud and AI workloads follow fundamentally different traffic patterns from the user-to-app flows SSE was originally built to handle. In cloud environments, workload and API traffic often stay within cloud-native routing paths that never naturally traverse the SSE inspection layer.
To solve these problems, organizations frequently have to retool and introduce additional routing, tunneling, service insertion, and/or centralized inspection architectures, which increase complexity and operational overhead.
Where the Architecture Outruns the Org Chart
Architectural complexity is only half the issue. The harder problem is operational ownership. Most vendor architectures implicitly assume this has already been solved.
We’re hard-pressed to find organizations that can demonstrate clear, end-to-end visibility, operational understanding, and consistent enforcement across network, cloud, AI, and user activity.
Often, this story is spread across four or more platforms and log streams. Every individual team believes it has complete visibility into the layer of the environment for which it’s responsible: The cloud team sees cloud egress and dev; the security team sees policy enforcement; the network team sees transport. Modern workload paths span all three simultaneously, which means operations become fragmented and insecure even when each team’s preferred platform appears healthy in isolation.
Operational Reality Becomes Architectural Reality
Organizations need to better account for how their entire environment is actually operated, secured, troubleshot, hardened, and improved. Most organizations already know seams exist. They see them during incident reviews, tabletop exercises, audit preparation, and troubleshooting calls. The issue is that those lessons often get trapped in operational processes, used to fix problems as they (continually) arise rather than feeding back into architectural design improvements.
The next time you review your SSE or cloud routing architecture, look past the packet flow. Look at the people flow. If your teams can’t trace a workload path end to end on a whiteboard today, they’ll eventually be forced to trace it during a live incident.
The organizations that handle this integration well are usually not the ones with the most tooling. They are the ones who acknowledge early that SSE, cloud routing, identity, and workload governance have become operationally intertwined, whether the org chart reflects it or not. Instead of siloed platform operations, they focus on designing for shared visibility and collective operational ownership.
Guest Author
Zach Frankhouser — Global NetSec Practice Lead
Zach Frankhouser is a network and security sales leader with over 15 years of experience across enterprise connectivity, managed infrastructure, WAN modernization, and cloud-delivered security. Combining a background in technical solution development with enterprise sales leadership, he works with organizations navigating network modernization, cloud-driven traffic changes, and evolving security architectures.
Prior to Globalgig, Zach held leadership roles across enterprise networking and managed services. At Globalgig, he leads strategic SASE and security initiatives focused on secure enterprise connectivity, operational scalability, and long-term infrastructure modernization.