By Catherine Sbeglia Nin
According a new Dell’Oro Group report, the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market saw a 37 per cent growth in 2021, fueled mainly by the convergence of WAN enterprise networking and security. As a result, stated the report, SASE networking and security is now a more than US$4 billion market.
Secure Access Service Edge combines network security functions together with principles of SD-WAN. SASE is typically delivered on-demand in the cloud, as a managed service — part of the ever-expanding tapestry of “as a Service” solutions made possible by cloud computing. SD-WAN enables IT departments to direct network connectivity and functionality as discrete software functions instead of relying on specialized networking hardware. It also bundles individual existing cloud security tools into one complete solution. SASE aligns network security functions including Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Zero-Touch Network Access (ZTNA).
The report also concluded that while more than 30 vendors compete in the SASE market, the top ten took in nearly 80 per cent of the revenue. Additionally, firewall revenue rebounded in 2021 by rising 13 per cent, setting a new record exceeding US$10 billion for the first time.
“The pandemic made remote work and cloud-based applications necessary, and by doing so, accelerated the obsolescence of the classic hub-and-spoke networking model,” said research director, Network Security, and SASE & SD-WAN at Dell’Oro Group, Mauricio Sanchez,. “Rather than thinking of networking and security as separate problems to solve, they are now being thought of as a continuum and driving together cloud-friendly networking and security technologies into SASE.”
