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Secure access service edge (SASE), as an architecture, is only three years old, but rapid adoption by organizations is making SASE one of the fastest-growing technology market categories in history. Functionally, SASE will change—and is already changing—how teams make security and networking technology purchases. Gartner® predicts that by 2025, 50% of new SD-WAN purchases will be part of a single-vendor SASE offering, and that one-third of new SASE deployments will be based on a single-vendor-SASE offering.
Naturally, the rush to embrace SASE has led to significant vendor marketing hype and confusing messaging. Fortunately, the recently published Gartner Market Guide for Single-Vendor SASE addresses some key SASE-related market needs and important points of differentiation. We strongly encourage you to read the guide, which is available as a complimentary download here.
Netskope is the only Gartner 2022 Security Service Edge (SSE) Magic Quadrant™ Leader also appearing in this Market Guide. With this in mind, we note the following takeaways:
SASE is now a CIO-level imperative
At Netskope we’ve been examining for a while now how the promise of SASE will go unfulfilled if traditional barriers between security and networking teams continue to persist. Forward-thinking organizations have already sought to foster better collaboration. But as Gartner notes*, the CIO is the executive best placed to sponsor and deliver SASE projects, not only because some originate from security teams and some from networking teams, but also, by definition, SASE will need to enable the new normal of hybrid work.
It’s on CIOs to form cross-functional teams from traditionally siloed network and security functions and decide on the right roadmap for adopting SASE.
Enterprise customers will continue to need flexibility and choice with SASE vendors
As a technology architecture, SASE is ideally sourced from as few vendors as possible to reduce cap-ex, op-ex, and administrative headaches across IT teams. A unified policy framework and single agent architecture across all SD-WAN and security use cases can improve user experience, close gaps (which attackers may exploit), and reduce operating complexity. In reality, the vast majority of organizations have mixed-vendor environments that can’t be quickly reduced, let alone ripped-and-replaced.
As Gartner notes in the Market Guide, “Some customers—those with separate networking and network security teams, or that have already deployed an SD-WAN (or managed SD-WAN) and/or SSE provider—may select different vendors for the other components and look to purchase a separate offering, ideally integrated through an explicit partnership.”
Risk-aware data protection and context-driven web and cloud security controls are among factors separating contenders from pretenders in single-vendor SASE
Gartner highlights sensitive-data visibility and control as “difficult for many SASE vendors to address,” which was also a point addressed in the 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Security Service Edge (SSE) report.
Organizations looking for maturity among single-vendor providers of SASE should ensure advanced da