“There was life before SD-WAN and there is life after SD-WAN,” Roy Chua, founder of network consultancy AvidThink, said during a Cato Networks webinar titled “Don’t Renew Your SD-WAN Contract Before Watching This Webinar.”

Chua added that now, years after the technology “came up in the scene,” many enterprises are up for renewal, begging the question of whether they should make any changes to their SD-WAN.

“If everything is going great, everything is not changing, everyone is happy, and you love your SD-WAN provider, great, stick with the SD-WAN provider,” he said.

Though for most companies, necessary SD-WAN reevaluations are being triggered by new questions surrounding global connectivity, scaling remote access and enabling zero-trust network access (ZTNA), improving cloud connectivity, and adding security management, Chua explained.

He added, “It is a different world, and the needs have changed.”

With more players in the space than there once were, Chua suggested enterprises consider several factors before renewing old contracts, with the most important being that “the cloud has further risen in importance.”

Topological shifts in workloads have seen major productivity applications migrate to the cloud, an increased use of cloud storage, and hybrid clouds hosting Enterprise applications.

“There are operational benefits to going to the cloud,” Chua said, adding the cloud allows enterprises to offload maintenance of security and networking stacks to as-a-service solution vendors.

“What we’re seeing especially with very large enterprises, even midsize enterprises, is the cloud has become very important to their IT strategy,” he added.

Chua said the expanded importance of cloud brought to the SD-WAN landscape a new acronym – secure access service edge (SASE), or Gartner’s term for the convergence of networking and security as a cloud-delivered service.

Gartner says a complete SASE offering combines network edge capabilities – most notably SD-WAN – and a set of cloud-centric security capabilities dubbed the security services edge (SSE), a cloud-delivered security suite that includes ZTNA, cloud-access security broker (Cloud Access Security Broker), secure web gateway (SWG), and firewall-as-a-service (FaaS).

Chua noted when SASE was first defined, very few vendors (if any) qualified to offer a complete solution.

But many leading SD-WAN vendors have moved fast to add a cloud-based security stack to build out a single-vendor SASE, and a few SSE vendors have acquired the SD-WAN tech to deliver single-vendor SASE, according to Gartner,

When it comes time to renew an SD-WAN contract, if an existing vendor is “mostly working fine,” or budget and resource limitations prevent an upgrade, Chua said adding an SSE vendor provides quick-to-implement Enterprise edge security, savings, and manageability without having to Switch contracts.

When an Enterprise needs improved SD-WAN features, like global points of presence (POPs), or a different management model, switching SD-WAN contracts and adding an SSE vendor is another option.

Although Chua said in either case, managing two distinct vendors adds complexity and overhead. Depending on the type of SD-WAN, two different deployment and management models may “interact poorly.”

If enterprises are interested in a what Chua calls a “future-ready” solution, full-stack SASE is the path to choose.

“Maybe it’s time. You say SD-WAN has been great, but it’s time, and you can make this Switch,” he said, adding switching to SASE should only happen when an Enterprise is able to make a joint networking and security decision and can benefit from upgrading into a converged stack with a unified networking-security policy.

“Make sure that whatever SASE vendor that you pick has the appropriate strength on the networking side to meet all the needs that you had before and will have in the near future,” Chua said. “And that the SASE security stack is a complete stack and meets all your needs now and in the foreseeable future, and it comes all together under one context, one solution.”

Cato Networks, Cisco, Citrix, Fortinet, Forcepoint, Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks, and VMware are the only vendors recognized by Gartner as representative vendors in the single-vendor SASE market, meaning they offer complete SASE solutions.