How SASE Vendors Design Their Solution - Part 2: The Peering Truth—What Does a Good Strategy Look Like?

The Vanity Metric Trap: Why More POPs Doesn't Mean Faster Traffic

In the SASE marketing playbook, the most pervasive vanity metric is point-of-presence (POP) count. Providers frequently advertise hundreds of global locations to suggest ubiquitous proximity. However, field engineers know that routing physics tell a very different story.

Many alternative SASE architectures achieve inflated numbers by deploying dozens of shallow, virtualized mini-POPs. These edge nodes are frequently single-homed to a local ISP with zero direct peering to critical SaaS applications. When users connect, the node must backhaul traffic across congested public transit to reach primary destinations. Proximity to the user provides zero benefit if the edge lacks high-speed upstream connectivity, leading to packet loss and latency spikes.

Why You Can't Rely on Putting SASE Inside Cloud Service Providers (CSPs)

To avoid physical infrastructure investments, several first-generation cloud security vendors built their entire enforcement tier inside third-party Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. While this allows rapid geographical expansion, it introduces severe architectural bottlenecks.

First, CSPs are designed as walled computing environments, not carrier-grade transit exchanges. When enterprise traffic enters a SASE enforcement point hosted in a public cloud, it is subjected to public cloud routing limitations. CSP networks optimize for their own internal service delivery rather than external transit. If a remote worker connects to an AWS-hosted SASE POP to access Microsoft 365 or Salesforce, the traffic must traverse complex routing gateways, hop across public cloud boundaries, and endure latency-inducing "hairpins."

Second, public cloud economics directly impacts network performance. Moving traffic out of public clouds incurs exorbitant egress costs. When vendors pay per gigabyte to send traffic across cloud borders, they face a perverse economic incentive: optimize for the cheapest egress path rather than the fastest path. This financial friction inevitably compromises enterprise throughput.

The Power of Major Strategic Hubs: Dense, Multi-Homed Peering

A mature, high-performance SASE architecture takes the opposite approach by establishing dedicated edge deployments within major carrier-neutral Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) (such as Equinix, CoreSite, and DE-CIX). Rather than scattering low-capacity instances across hundreds of disconnected sites, this model concentrates capacity into robust regional transit hubs.

Operating under dedicated Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs), these major hubs implement a symmetric peering strategy that provides three decisive advantages:

1. Direct SaaS Cross-Connects: Major IXPs house hyperscalers and key enterprise SaaS applications under one physical roof. Through bilateral peering, the SASE data plane hands off inspected traffic directly to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or AWS across local dark-fiber cross-connects in under two milliseconds.
2. Dense BGP Multi-Homing: Enterprise-grade hubs maintain simultaneous connections to multiple Tier 1 backbones and local eyeball ISPs. Through sophisticated BGP routing policies, the platform detects upstream degradation and dynamically shifts traffic paths without dropping active sessions.
3. Deterministic Symmetric Routing: Dispersed mini-hubs and CSP environments frequently cause asymmetric routing, where request and return packets traverse disparate paths. Major interconnect hubs maintain deterministic, symmetric paths across the entire transaction lifecycle.

Architectural Summary: Peering Strategy Trade-offs

Ultimately, a world-class SASE architecture is defined by the quality of its interconnections, not the quantity of its marketing dots. Concentrating traffic in carrier-grade hubs with rich peering delivers the predictable, low-latency performance that modern enterprise environments demand.