VMware sees enterprises continuing or starting to educate themselves on Gartner’s secure access service edge (SASE) framework with the goal of determining the “best approach for transitioning from their current approaches to wide area network and perimeter security,” VMware Senior Director Karl Brown said.

And despite much of the hype surrounding single-vendor SASE services that include a unified management plane covering the breadth of all SASE functionalities from one vendor, VMware anticipates customers will continue to look for vendors to support an open architecture, allowing for either a single or dual-vendor approach to SASE.

Gartner this year released its first guide to single-vendor SASE and gave nods to capable vendors Cato Networks, Cisco, Citrix, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks, and VMware, many of which have loudly touted single-vendor solutions as the option for enterprise customers.

But the analyst firm says using two vendors to complete a SASE portfolio is a viable approach, and even preferable for some enterprises.

“A dual-vendor approach means that enterprises can deploy the capabilities that they need for networking and security without being limited to what a single vendor can provide,” Brown told SDxCentral in an email.

“Or said differently, to minimize the inefficiencies of two vendors, enterprises are asking SD-WAN and SSE partners to collaborate to achieve a tight integration across both management and data planes. This gives the enterprise more options on how they start their journey to a single vendor SASE architecture.”

Echoing VMware’s prediction, research from Axis Security released at the beginning of 2023 showed that preference toward single-vendor SASE versus multivendor SASE among cybersecurity professionals was split, with just 51% in favor of a single-vendor approach.

Expanding SASE, SD-WAN application requirements

Brown noted enterprise lines of business and operational technology teams are developing new applications or modernizing legacy applications to meet their business objectives.

“These new applications will collect and process volumes of ephemeral data from a large number and wide array of devices in near real-time,” he said, adding this new volume of data and requirements for low latency will mean backhauling data to a cloud or traditional data center is not “economically or technically feasible.”

That said, Brown explained requirements for SD-WAN and SASE will expand to encompass connectivity to the edge, meaning applications at the edge will “require a low-latency, secure, and resilient network infrastructure.”

“Many new intelligent endpoints will require 5G or LTE LAN connectivity for enhanced mobility, coverage, performance, and reliability,” he added.

Applications at the edge will also start to require compute capabilities. “Deploying dedicated servers is not feasible in many locations because they add to the operational burden while posing security risks,” Brown said. “Instead, enterprises should look for SD-WAN and SASE solutions that can host edge applications.”

Brown added that given the large volume of endpoints and the increased number of workloads, an understanding of application performance at the edge will also require artificial intelligence-assisted tools, and “therefore AIOps-based functionality is a requirement for SD-WAN and SASE management to function optimally."