Industry trade group MEF released its “State of the Industry Report: SASE” report underscoring the role of its standards-based secure access service edge (SASE) certification program in helping enterprise networking and cybersecurity decision-makers identify effective solutions.

MEF emphasized the importance of industry standards and certification programs in ensuring consistent terminology and validated security effectiveness, which it claims will help build trust in SASE solutions and accelerate their adoption across the industry.

For example, its MEF SASE certification program is designed to help build an efficient market by aligning stakeholders on common terminology, supporting SASE education and training, making it easier to integrate SD-WAN, zero trust and security service edge (SSE) elements into solutions, and validating the cybersecurity defense effectiveness and application performance of SASE technologies and services.

“We want to make your job easier,” Stan Hubbard, principle analyst at MEF and author of the report, told SDxCentral on the main thrust of those efforts. “So when you're looking to identify solutions that you can integrate into your digital transformation strategy, your cybersecurity strategy, we're giving you standards-based solutions that can go through testing and be validated, that they perform at a certain expectation. And so this is the first time the industry's done this when it comes to SASE.”

The benefits of standards-based SASE certification One of the touted advantages of the SASE certification is its ability to streamline industry conversations and eliminate confusion.

Historically, enterprises and vendors have struggled with defining and understanding SASE components, leading to inefficiencies. Establishing a standardized approach agreed upon by leading technology vendors and SASE service providers helps enterprises avoid lengthy initial discussions and focus on integration and deployment.

“What we're trying to do is increase the efficiency of the industry, help that conversation along by setting out a standardized approach that the leading technology vendors have all agreed to and leading SASE service providers have agreed to, and that enterprises can step up and begin to start including in their RFPs [request for proposals] and RFIs [request for information],” Hubbard said. “It's designed to get past this whole issue of everybody having to spend the initial hour in their discussions with each other about what is SASE.”

Hubbard noted MEF's certification program collaborates with the industry's top players, ensuring they agree on core capabilities while allowing differentiation in customer experience and additional capabilities. The program also helps managed service providers and SASE users to distinguish between a disaggregated, multivendor approach, a single-vendor solution and a unified SASE offering, he added.

MEF is about to announce the first certified SASE vendors MEF last year unveiled its SASE Product and Services Certification, which is based on CyberRatings’ methodologies and test programs. The certification provides a rating on product and service effectiveness, performance, functionality and management of SD-WAN, SSE threat protection and zero-trust network access (ZTNA).

MEF has a new SASE certification that is in beta, and includes participation of SASE technology suppliers including Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks and VMware by Broadcom. The beta stage will soon transition to general availability in the second half of this year. “One of the reasons that we wanted to introduce this report prior to the announcement of full general availability is so that companies can get ready,” Hubbard said.

Hubbard said this validation is a significant market differentiator for SASE technology providers and managed service providers. While it might not immediately impact your business, as the market increasingly favors validated solutions, you don't want to be left behind, he added.

“I think there will be a large number of SD-WAN managed service providers that will move down this path and express interest in the SASE [certification] or in the SD-WAN certification before they evolve,” Hubbard said.