Both the SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) markets expanded rapidly in 2023, and neither shows any signs of slowing down in 2024. Last year, vendors rolled out new features, set their sights on security improvements, and consolidated what were previously separate features into integrated solutions.

Expect both SD-WAN and SASE sectors to stay red hot, but the two solutions, which are already encroaching on each other’s territory, will further consolidate. Other trends to watch include a SASE market expansion strategy that echoes the SD-WAN playbook from a decade ago, pressure from the expanding edge, increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) and the need for a security-first foundation to modern WANs that is able to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape.

Below are 6 SD-WAN and SASE predictions for 2024:

1. SD-WAN and SASE markets will stay red hot 

The past year was a good one for the SD-WAN and SASE markets. Gartner forecasts that the SD-WAN market topped $5 billion by the end of 2023, with market penetration reaching 60%. The firm predicts the market will continue to expand at a 14.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), reaching $8 billion by 2026. Research firm IDC is slightly less bullish, predicting the SD-WAN market will expand at a 10.1% CAGR, growing into a $7.5 billion market by 2027.

According to a recently published report from Dell’Oro Group, the SASE market – which the research firm defines as consisting of SD-WAN and security services edge (SSE) (SSE) solutions – grew 33% during the third quarter of 2023, with revenue hitting $2.2 billion for the quarter. Dell'Oro Group notes the SSE and SD-WAN portions of the SASE market have nearly doubled in the last 10 quarters, indicating that enterprises are continuing to invest heavily in both networking and security.

“Although other networking and security technology markets have started to show clear struggles in a volatile macroeconomic environment, enterprises know they need to continue to invest for the future that will have hybrid work and cloud-based applications as the norm, and for many, SASE is the right approach,” Dell'Oro Group analyst Mauricio Sanchez stated.

Gartner, meanwhile, predicts that the number of vendors competing in the single-vendor SASE market will increase more than 50% by 2025.

Research firm Expereo surveyed 650 CIOs from large and mid-sized enterprises in Asia, Europe, and North America and found that “51% of global CIOs are set to increase investments in SASE, while 45% are set to increase investments in SD-WAN.”

2. SD-WAN and SASE will be key to global market expansions

As the global economy continues to integrate, Expero Chief Revenue Officer Ben Elms argues that connectivity will be a key enabler of international growth. “Almost half (46%) of CIOs we surveyed claimed that establishing and managing connectivity in new markets is the single most critical factor in ensuring successful global expansion, and 42% said that their board views global connectivity as a business asset critical to growth,” Elms said.

Expereo also found that more than one-third of those surveyed considered a lack of connectivity as a constraint on growth into new markets around the globe.

Data from research firm TeleGeography, meanwhile, predicts that the 5,000 largest global enterprises would have SD-WAN installed at 61% of global WAN sites by the end of 2023, growing to 81% by 2026.

Expect both SD-WAN and SASE adoption to continue at a blistering pace around the globe in 2024.

3. SD-WAN and SASE feature consolidation will unlock mid and SMB markets

As large enterprises evolve beyond basic connectivity concerns to demand advanced features like automation, edge security, and easier to use services, the SD-WAN and SASE vendors that meet those demands will also pick up steam.

When the first SD-WAN services rolled out approximately a decade ago, the early movers targeted the mid-market, pitching SD-WAN as an alternative for businesses that could not afford expensive private networks, such as MPLS. What has happened in the interim is that large enterprises have been aggressively adopting SD-WAN, often using it as an additional service to MPLS rather than as a replacement.

Could SASE vendors take a page out of SD-WAN's early playbook and find opportunities in the mid-market and even with SMBs in 2024?

As AI and automation allow hackers to target organizations of all sizes, a larger swath of the market will seek solutions that used to be confined to large enterprises.

“I anticipate SASE capabilities will increasingly extend Fortune 500-level security to small and medium-sized businesses,” Etay Maor, senior director of security strategy at Cato Networks, explained. “SASE, while previously reserved for larger enterprises that could afford maintenance costs, will advance smaller companies’ security features and sophistication. SASE will continually offer more capabilities that in the past were reserved only for point or niche solutions. In 2024, the market will be able to offer a more converged and consolidated solution than ever before.”

4. AI supercharges both SD-WAN and SASE

As WANs expand, they require automation to efficiently route traffic to numerous resources, both in-house and in the cloud, but current solutions offer limited automation capabilities.

“Organizations today use limited, siloed automation capabilities to manage uptime and performance of networking and security infrastructure,” Parag Thakore, SVP for Netskope, said. “Teams are mostly responding when downtime occurs.”

Thakore explained that advanced SASE offerings will emerge that leverage AI and machine learning (ML) techniques to predict and resolve issues and prevent downtime by proactively suggesting network and security policy changes. “These capabilities will [provide] advanced data protection capabilities that ensure generative AI (genAI) usage does not become a security risk,” Thakore said.

AI will also become a key SD-WAN feature, creating self-healing, self-optimizing networks that are able to adapt to real-time network conditions and predict future problems by assessing historical trends.

“AI will play a crucial role in SD-WAN/SASE solutions … providing organizations with valuable insights into network traffic, security threats, and performance optimization, while also allowing for proactive and predictive actions at scale,” Erez Tadmor, network security evangelist at Tufin, added.

5. As enterprises cope with expanding edge, lines between SD-WAN and SASE blur

As enterprise threats evolve, they are seeking to turn the way they connect to the edge as the primary means to manage and secure it.

When SD-WAN services began to challenge MPLS a decade ago, the service was primarily used to connect to branch offices. Now, the corporate edge encompasses much more than branch offices and remote work sites.

Today, enterprise IT must deliver connectivity to and security for an expanding edge that encompasses everything from traditional branch offices to multiple clouds, IoT deployments, smart factories, work-from-home and hybrid employees.

IDC predicts IoT networks will continue to expand rapidly, growing to include 55.7 billion devices by 2025. Those IoT devices are expected to generate 80 zettabytes of data.

At the same time, the persistence of work-from-home trends will challenge enterprise IT to deliver consistent and secure connectivity to business-critical applications. “Work-from-anywhere will become a universal requirement encompassing users in the office, on the road, or working from home,” Cloudbrink CEO Prakash Mana explained. “Enterprise CXOs will no longer tolerate the increased security risks and lower productivity of remote/mobile workers, instead demanding higher productivity with fewer breaches across the entire workforce.”

As the edge sprawls on in 2024, expect to see the lines between SD-WAN and SASE continue to blur. SD-WAN vendors whose roots are in networking will continue to bolster their security features, and SASE vendors will start to layer networking capabilities on top of their security foundations.

6. Zero trust will underpin new platform approach to connectivity and unified security

The convergence of SD-WAN and SASE is already happening, but today much of the convergence is through partnerships that force enterprises to manage multivendor WANs. As simpler solutions emerge, vendors will begin to leverage the true promise of software-defined technologies, evolving beyond legacy network designs that clumsily bolt security to networking to embrace a new security-first paradigm that meets today’s evolving threat landscape.

Zero-trust security solutions are gaining mindshare amongst CIOs and other IT decision makers, but Gartner noted businesses struggle to implement mature zero-trust solutions. Issues such as poor interoperability among vendors, lack of scalability, and complexity prevent zero trust from becoming mainstream.

That could start to change in 2024, as both SASE and SD-WAN vendors seek to simplify and consolidate their solutions.

“The drive for deploying and operating security at scale with simplicity, agility, and lower costs will shift [SD-WAN/SASE] deployments from a set of bespoke products to a platform-based approach,” Versa Networks CEO Kelly Ahuja said. “This will rely on an authentically unified zero-trust networking platform – a singular, integrated platform crafted to seamlessly converge networking and security well beyond the traditional category definition of the WAN to every edge – local area network [LAN], WAN, cloud, data center.”

While zero trust may not yet be mature enough to dominate in 2024, expect to see both SD-WAN and SASE vendors continue to break networking and security features out of siloes, integrating them to create a unified zero-trust approach to connectivity and security.