As more enterprises move to adopt secure access service edge (SASE) technology, managed services providers can offer “extensive knowledge and expertise," Palo Alto Networks Senior Manager of Product Management Ron Ronco said.

Analyst firm Gartner coined SASE in a 2019 report as the convergence of network access and security in cloud-native environments. Over the next four years, the SASE market is expected to reach almost $15 billion by 2025. But Ronco explained that SASE adoption is a complex process that will occur over multiple years for most enterprises.

“Every enterprise really needs to step back, look at where they want to be in the next three to five years, and put together a plan,” Ronco said.

“There's folks out there that just do managed security services and those that do manage network services,” He added. “You really need someone who can do managed SASE services, to be able to bring the best of security knowledge, along with the network.”

Ronco said the first requirement for a managed SASE service is “single screen, cloud-based management.” Enterprises can choose to build their own integrations for these management portals, but regardless, “management needs to be extremely flexible and needs to enable fully managed and co-managed services.”

Silos between network and security teams should essentially disappear to implement SASE, according to Gartner. However, it will take time for those organizational transformations to happen.

“So within that database management system, how do you maintain that separation while everyone's getting comfortable,” Ronco said. “It has to have very sophisticated role-based access controls.”

Additionally, enterprises should look for managed SASE offerings to have open APIs, Ronco said, adding “I can't reiterate enough how important this is.”

Open APIs and a scaled API framework gives enterprises the ability to do “anything [they] need to do from day zero to day one workflows.” Vendors have embedded capabilities in their platforms, and enterprises can access those capabilities in different ways, including tying them into existing infrastructures like ServiceNow and LogicMonitor, Ronco said.

“That open API framework should give you the ability to do configurations across all tenants where it makes sense – do log management reporting, licensing, and have along with it a developer portal so that you can actually build more and more things,” he explained. “The vendors can only move so fast. But if we give you the support, you can move faster, in some cases.”