Demand for secure access service edge (SASE) has grown tremendously during the pandemic. As adoption picks up, vendors are promising feature-rich and integrated SASE solutions. Customers have different needs when it comes to SASE, however, and it’s not always easy to understand what a SASE provider is offering.
As an approach, SASE combines networking and security into a scalable cloud service that fits with the remote and hybrid work models companies use today. Potential benefits include easier network and security management, flexibility to scale up or down as business needs require, and lower costs.
Functionally, the five main pillars of SASE are SD-WAN, firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), and zero trust network access (ZTNA).
Many SASE vendors don’t yet have the full stack of features, and some partner with other companies to fill the gaps.
The SASE vendor-selection process is complicated further by the fact that vendors are differentiating themselves by promising additional capabilities such as remote browser isolation, data loss prevention, AI and machine-learning integration to automate IT functions, self-healing for improved operational efficiency, and IoT security.
Given the wide range of SASE capabilities, some industry watchers are predicting SASE adoption paths will prioritize either networking or security functions, depending on an enterprise’s most pressing requirements.
According to Gartner, instead of using multiple vendors to get cloud-delivered SWG, CASB, ZTNA, and FWaaS, 30% of enterprises will use a single vendor by 2024, up from less than 5% in 2020.
