SSE: Is the modern alternative always best?

Cybersecurity in modern networking and computer science is more important today than ithas been in the past. More and more of our daily lives depend on technology-basedinfrastructure which is susceptible to cyber-attacks. Because of the prevalence of attacks andrising usage of cloud environments, Secure Service Edge (SSE) was created as a unified stackto combine various features to heighten qualities such as security, integrity, and control.Because of the increasing popularity of SSE and related solutions such as Secure AccessService Edge (SASE), this thesis compares the level of both corporate control and integrity inthe cloud-based SSE solution to a hardware-based Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) solution. This is carried out through a qualitative approach, combining a literature reviewwith logical analysis to compare the two topologies through documentation, research andcategorization. This allowed for a result to be not only based on quantity of tools but alsoquality and relation of those tools. When looking at features that the SSE and NGFWenvironment had in common most of those features were similar enough to not have a largeimpact on integrity or control, but some outliers were found. The evaluations in this thesisreveal that the SSE representative environment not only provides more tools related tointegrity and security but also that those tools had an overall larger impact as well. Thisshows that if either control or integrity is of importance for the network then a cloud-basedSSE solution should be considered.