Secure Access Service Edge Growth Opportunities

Accelerated Cloud Migration and Distributed Workforce Requirements Drive SASE Growth Potential

Frost & Sullivan expects SASE adoption to maintain strong growth momentum during the next 5 years, mainly because of factors including the shift to remote and hybrid work models, rapid adoption of cloud and cloud-delivered services, increasing requirements toward integrating disjointed networking and security solutions, and the rising need to support edge computing use cases.

Across industries, organizations are experiencing a strong need to modernize their IT infrastructure and thus accelerate digital initiatives by embracing the SASE model. By converging networking and security functions under a unified cloud-based platform, SASE positions organizations to offload the operational burden of managing and maintaining various network and security hardware appliances. SASE's cloud-native architecture also enables enhanced scalability, flexibility, and secure access for a distributed environment while optimizing network performance-regardless of user or branch location.

The single vendor SASE approach is gaining popularity, and in the next 3 years, the shift from a multiple vendor SASE to a single SASE offering will increase. Organizations will continue to consolidate vendors and benefit from unified SASE solutions over best-of-breed SASE components from multiple vendors. The convergence approach allows organizations to overcome challenges posed by tool sprawl, such as operational complexity, limited visibility, and potential security gaps as well as to prioritize enhanced interoperability between security and networking functions for a better outcome and user experience.

This study covers vendors that provide a converged SASE platform and vendors offering SASE products/components that enable SASE architecture via service chaining. The platform and product portfolio must include the following services/capabilities:

Networking services: Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and a global point of presence (PoP) system (running in public clouds or private data centers); SD-WAN is a must-have capability for inclusion.

Security services: Firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and secure web gateway (SWG).

The study provides insights into the global market landscape with a regional breakdown of North America (NA); Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); Asia-Pacific (APAC); and Latin America (LATAM). Revenue for SASE platforms and portfolios includes revenue from edge devices (routers, firewall platforms, and networking sockets) and cloud SASE service offerings under a managed service (by the vendor or local partners). The study period is 2021 to 2027.

This report recognizes license revenue for the SASE software stacks/images that end users deploy and manage at their data centers or their local service providers' physical or cloud data centers; however, this model (not recommended) may not scale well and does not effectively support remote users. The study excludes revenue from the partnership model, but it features vendors that provide core components of SASE and those with a SASE roadmap.