“SD-WAN was primarily done for outside the cloud, to marry multiple different types of transports and not about optimizing the cloud,” Amir Khan said.

The computing giant has linked with Casa Systems and Enea on a private 5G platform that is targeting the rapidly expanding market.

"I sell SASE and SD-WAN, but very few SD-WAN players are SASE-capable," Nikesh Arora said.

"Don't just pick a[n edge] vendor and go that route," Gartner Analyst Thomas Bittman warned.

Interestingly, its rival Cisco recently took the exact opposite path to expand its secure access service edge reach.

"I feel like I could actually just scream," Gartner Analyst Jeffrey Hewitt said of the talent shortage's tenacity.

"You use the word innovation incorrectly," Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner told the networking vendors in the audience.

Almost all (96%) surveyed organizations consider security resilience crucial to their business, Cisco found in a recent report.

By 2025, 50% of edge computing solutions deployed before a strategy has taken shape will fail to meet enterprise goals, Gartner says.

Aryaka VP Craig Patterson sung the praises of managed SD-WAN as a crucial failsafe for maintaining enterprise network uptime.

Secure service access encompasses secure access service edge, zero-trust network access, and extended detection and response, according to GigaOm.

Managed services can offer “extensive knowledge and expertise” to ease the transition to secure access service edge, Ron Ronco said.

Aruba is investing in the data center space while "looking at" private 5G, and security as part of a secure access service edge solution, President Phil Mottram said

“The one thing that's common across the board is the desire to modernize and become more cloud-like," AWS' Jan Hofmeyr said of telecom operators.

"It's a strong differentiator for us, and I don't see any of our competitors going to that length today," SUSE GM of Edge Keith Basil said.

Douglas Bellin said the average machine age across manufacturing globally is 25 years old, meaning most equipment can't communicate with a 5G radio.

"The reality is that we already have in almost every operator at least two, if not three, hyperscalers in play," Red Hat's Ian Hood said.

Windstream Director Chris Alberding said "the cost is going down" and "the ease of implementation is going up" for data loss protection.

As secure access service edge adoption continues across industries Gartner is seeing a particular emphasis on single-vendor strategy.

Perimeter 81 also found secure service edge is a core priority for respondents who had concerns with data privacy and cloud security.

Analysis Mason found edge compute components remain rare in current private network deployments despite their inherit synergies.

Because SASE is still a work in progress, CIO and CISOs "need to rethink their respective roles" in supporting infrastructure operations.

The carrier's initial private network deals have resulted in incremental spending by customers.

The edge platform IBM is building for India's Bharti Airtel will bring low-latency edge computing to customers, according to Shawn D'Souza.