When two trends like 5G and secure access service edge (SASE) gain traction – or at least mindshare – with enterprise IT leaders, it’s only a matter of time before they are included in the same conversation. That’s happening now as vendors and startups tout 5G as the “ideal blueprint for SASE.”

But are 5G and SASE really “a match made in heaven,” or is it all just marketing hype? Likely, it's a bit of both.

Most network and security vendors agree that as 5G deployments proliferate, changes in network architecture will require cybersecurity to change too. “Centralized internet breakout and backhauled user connections contradict the intent of 5G. This is why SASE and 5G are naturally complimentary,” Netskope’s Steve Foster said in a company blog.

Enterprise can leverage the high speed and low-latency of 5G to provide access to the SASE cloud to give users direct, secure, and controlled access to SaaS, web, or zero-trust network access (ZTNA) applications, and the site-to-site or site-to-cloud/data center connectivity that internet of things (IoT) or legacy applications require, Foster added.

SASE provider Versa Networks has also drawn more attention to the 5G compatibility of its SASE portfolio. CEO Kelly Ahuja attributes this to emerging 5G use cases that introduce a new set of security threats, such as kernel bypass, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and exploitation of software or hardware vulnerabilities leading to zero-day exploits.

Ahuja says SASE can address these challenges by enabling automated 5G rollout of “thousands of devices” with end-to-end security, including zero-trust network access (ZTNA), firewall, secure web gateway (SWG), and cloud access security broker (CASB).

“It becomes very important to offer security consistently and have that flexibility that 5G provides,” he told SDxCentral. “SASE cloud implementation, taking all the traffic from that 5G node or branch and bringing it into a SASE cloud, allows the enterprise to do it very quickly and effectively.”

What enterprises need to know as they’re hit with 5G SASE marketing is that all SASE frameworks should inherently support 5G networks anyway, according to Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner.

“What's happening is 5G is a pretty hot term. SASE is a pretty hot term. If we glue them together, we can kind of double up the pizzazz associated with how we speak about them,” Lerner said. “I won't say it's 100% marketing hype, but SASE is a product offering, and a SASE offering should operate over just about any modern network that an enterprise has.”

The SASE framework by definition is agnostic to transport, which means it can run over an IP network, according to Lerner. And the IP network could be based on any number of underlying technologies, “whether that's a wired internet connection, whether it's Ethernet in their branch LAN, whether it's 4G, 5G, satellite, microwave, etc,” he explained.

Lerner compared the relationship between 5G and SASE to a car on a road, with SASE as the car and the network transport as the road. If 5G is a new road being built, SASE should drive just as well on a new road as it does on an old one.

“The new car has to be able to drive on any of the roads,” he said. “5G is the road, SASE is the car, and they should absolutely be agnostic to each other. And thus, I don't see a strong affinity between them, period.”

However, Lerner noted that as the 3GPP 5G specification becomes increasingly omnipresent, there will be a need to secure the growing volume of applications and devices built around or connected to 5G networks. And vendors aren’t wrong to push for SASE as the answer to 5G security.

“Many enterprises looking to secure new things coming on the network are looking at SASE because of the reasons we've talked about SASE in the past. It just has inherent benefits, central policy, lower latency, etc,” Lerner said.

Still, he maintains the relationship between 5G and SASE is "an indirect relationship because SASE is a newer technology that enterprises are looking at, and 5G enables some new use cases for connectivity, but they're completely agnostic to one another and there isn't a strong direct affinity or technical integration between them.”

Despite the hype ramping up among SASE vendors, the reality is that 5G deployments are still a few years away for most enterprises. For example, SASE startup Exium puts 5G at the forefront of its messaging, calling the transport an “ideal blueprint” for SASE, and even the company’s CEO and founder Farooq Khan admits 5G adoption won’t really pick up for another two to three years.

“The adoption of 5G has been below our expectations, or maybe everybody’s expectations,” Khan told SDxCentral. “The whole industry was expecting 5G to pick up much more quickly.”

Khan said one of the challenges facing adoption is the “device ecosystem,” echoing Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg who this year said that 5G network opportunities have been hampered due to network radio availability challenges, which have in turn impacted service and deployment pricing options.

That said, Exium, Netskope, and Versa are all trying to get ahead of what Lerner says is an inevitable ubiquity of 5G, and single-vendor SASE providers that don’t yet have an embedded, integrated 5G interface are "behind the market."