Secure access service edge (SASE) will remain an enterprise priority in 2023, and push the market to reach $8 billion, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group.

The third quarter of 2022 marked the seventh quarter in a row with SASE revenue growth exceeding 25%, according to Dell'Oro Group, setting it apart from other network security markets the firm tracks. Dell'Oro Research Director Mauricio Sanchez told SDxCentral he expects "SASE will continue to see revenue expansion in 2023" driven by the same factors as this year.

Hybrid work and digital transformation efforts continue to prevail in modern enterprises, and cloud-based network security has emerged as a superior alternative to legacy VPN architectures. "The internet is now a logical extension of the corporate network, and the need for security is as great as ever," Sanchez explained. "Traditional approaches anchored only to on-premises solutions at the corporate internet gateway no longer work in the new 'anywhere, anytime, with any device' environment that the pandemic accelerated."

But the embrace of digitalization through shifting applications to the cloud and leveraging software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors has created "an unacceptable application user experience," Sanchez said. Traditional network architecture in a hub-and-spoke model means an enterprise has to backhaul traffic to a central location before forwarding it to the internet. This leads to poor cloud and app performance, undesirable latency, jitter, and throughput limitations.

"Breaking out traffic destined for the internet right at or close to the user, such as at a branch office, eliminates many of the pitfalls of the classic approach," he said.

Sanchez noted potential barriers to SASE's growth are macroeconomic, like the expected deterioration of the economy, but a mild recession is "unlikely to register as a headwind for SASE."

Sanchez said the SASE market's top vendors in the third quarter by market share were Cisco, Zscaler, Symantec/Broadcom, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks.

Although these five vendors have the most market share, the market is "very fragmented," according to Sanchez, who said he tracks more than 35 SASE vendors. "Whereas in most technology markets the top five to seven vendors typically represent 80% of market revenue, it still took the top 11 SASE vendors to do the same in Q3 2022," he explained.

As 2023 pans out, the cast of vendors at the top will likely rotate. Symantec, for example, has been steadily losing market share because it can't grow as quickly as Palo Alto Networks or Zscaler. "Unless they grow faster, they are likely to be overtaken," Sanchez noted.

SASE, which Gartner similarly identified as a top trend set to impact infrastructure and operations leaders in 2023, will remain on its network security investment throne, according to Dell'Oro.

On a broader cloud security scale, however, "there’s lot of attention being placed on application security," which is where specialized network security tech like web application firewalls (WAFs) fit in. "Growth there has been very strong, even during the pandemic," Sanchez said.

He also anticipates investment toward securing cloud-native workloads with cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs), cloud security posture management (CSPM), and cloud infrastructure entitlements management (CIEM), for example. "For full-year 2023, expect the cloud workload security market to climb [a] bit over 40% year-on-year and climb to nearly $7 billion," Sanchez said.