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After the introduction of security service edge (SSE) with the February 2022 release of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SSE, organizations may be wondering how they should choose an SSE vendor from the many profiled in the Gartner report. Interestingly enough during this year’s Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in June 2022, Gartner actually had a session titled “Do I Buy a SSE Product From a CASB Vendor or a SWG Vendor?”
The question is an interesting one because many of the vendors profiled in the Magic Quadrant started as a vendor of one of the three pillar technologies of SSE, either a cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), or a zero trust network access (ZTNA) vendor.
With SSE still relatively new, it’s also not unusual for vendors to be identified by their core product offering. I still hear customers and prospects referring to Netskope as a CASB vendor, and that’s no surprise given Netskope’s roots as a CASB vendor, specializing in cloud security and data protection. For those unfamiliar with SSE, it is part of Gartner’s secure access service edge (SASE) architecture and makes up the security services component of SASE (with the other component being the networking/SD-WAN capabilities).
The question of whether to select from a vendor with roots in CASB, SWG, or ZTNA still remains. Gartner’s session on the topic discussed what each of the different technologies brought to the table in terms of capabilities needed for SSE, and then looked at how much each technology would need to build or add to fill out the SSE feature set.
The analysis found that CASB, as an overall technology, had most of the features that matched the overall feature set needed by SSE, with ZTNA coming in second and SWG third. The resulting conclusion meant that CASB vendors had the least work to get to a full SSE feature set. Looking at the feature