Secure Access Fabric for Everything (SAFE)
SASE was a step toward convergence, but it stopped short of real Zero Trust. ZTE (Zero Trust Edge) made some ground in making Zero Trust more prominent, but it still only really focused on ZTNA.
SAFE completes the journey, replacing hypercentralised monolithic stacks with composable, distributed enforcement for modern networking. And importantly, Zero Trust isn't an after thought, its the foundation.
What is SAFE?
SAFE is the architectural model behind evolving ZERO – our platform for delivering Zero Trust not as a bolt-on, but as a principle embedded into the fabric of your network.
SAFE stands for Secure Access Fabric for Everything. It replaces the fragmented layers of legacy and cloud security with a unified, composable system.
Realising the potential
SAFE realises what SASE and ZTE set out to do: combine connectivity and security into one platform.
But it goes further – distributing enforcement, removing bottlenecks, and aligning with the original intent of Zero Trust: no trust, no traffic.
Trust that’s enforced everywhere, not just inspected in the cloud
Access based on identity and policy, not IP or location
A network that does nothing – unless trust is earned
From SASE to SAFE: a necessary shift
SASE helped organisations begin the convergence journey. But its implementation often recreated old problems in a new place:
Centralised inspection added latency
Cloud brokers became the new perimeter
Trust was assumed inside the mesh
SAFE is what comes next. It takes the best of SASE’s goals – convergence, simplicity, policy unification – and delivers them without legacy constraints.
SASE stack
Hypercentralised ZTNA traffic flows
Cloud-centric security
Static SD-WAN overlays
Single vendor lock-ins
Zero-trust as an after thought
SAFE model
Direct, low latency, efficient
Enforcement closest to the user
Dynamic, encrypted fabric
Modular, auditable, bring your own
Inherent zero-trust foundation
SAFE's four quadrants
SAFE defines the evolving ZERO platform across four architectural domains. Each one replaces legacy tooling with a modern, zero-trust-native service tier.
SAFE is the model
evolving ZERO is the platform
SAFE defines how Zero Trust should operate in practice – modular, distributed, policy-driven, and invisible by default.
evolving ZERO turns that model into a platform, with services, components, and controls that enforce the Zero Surface Architecture – our maximal, operational expression of Zero Trust.
