Telefónica last week tapped cloud security vendor Zscaler to develop a new managed security services edge (SSE) platform in a bid to address changing workforce dynamics and cloud consumption. The announcement illustrated a growing trend around the Gartner-coined product category, in which cloud security and secure access service edge (SASE) vendors alike announce “new” products and services around the buzzword.

But for the most part, these SSE products aren’t so much new as they’re rebranded and repackaged SASE services that’ve been stripped of their SD-WAN capabilities, if they ever had them in the first place. Zscaler's SSE is built around the same Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access products that, just a few months ago, it was calling SASE.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. SSE is essentially all the cloud security features encompassed by SASE without the edge networking or SD-WAN baggage.

“SSE is the security components of SASE focusing largely on the Cloud Access Security Broker, secure web gateway, and zero-trust network access products to enable secure use of the Internet and cloud services for a hybrid workforce working from anywhere,” Gartner analyst Charlie Winckless told SDxCentral in a recent interview.

What’s more, a standalone SSE platform may be more attractive to a large business that has to support an existing SD-WAN deployment or for organizations that have gone entirely remote, he added.

SASE brought with it a rapid convergence of WAN edge and cloud security capabilities under a single roof. The rise of standalone SSE products unwinds this a bit with a focus on supporting remote and hybrid workers and integrating with existing SD-WAN and/or perimeter security investments.

For many SASE vendors, this presents an opportunity to address a broader customer base with clearer marketing. Need SD-WAN and cloud security? Buy SASE. Already have SD-WAN and don’t plan to rip and replace anytime soon? Go SSE.

For SASE vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, or Versa — all three of which appeared in Gartner’s latest SSE Magic Quadrant report – this isn’t exactly a new idea. All three companies offer standalone SD-WAN and cloud security functionality in addition to their converged SASE architectures.

“When we see deployment of SSE, it’s very often in combination with SD-WAN,” Versa CMO Mike Wood told SDxCentral.

“Our preference is that customers deploy the complete package from Versa; that they buy the fully-loaded Denali right off the lot,” he said. But, “we also integrate with all of these other solutions. We’ve integrated with Zscaler for a long time, and we’ve integrated with Palo Alto Networks and Cisco.”

To this point, last year Comcast entered the managed SASE space by pairing Versa's SD-WAN with Zscaler's SSE platform. However, Versa also offers standalone security services for customers that want them. “We have customers that only deploy secure web gateway and don’t turn on SD-WAN,” Wood said.

The approach allows vendors to court customers at any phase of their digital transformation.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises were faced with an unprecedented shift to remote and later hybrid work. The great workforce migration spurred demand for new and better ways of securely connecting employees to the tools and workloads they rely on. On paper, SASE offered all the networking and security goodies an Enterprise could want in one convenient as-a-service model.

“There’s no doubt COVID-19 and the shift to remote work accelerated this dynamic,” Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald told SDxCentral in an interview early last year.

There was only one problem. While SASE in the eyes of customers may have become synonymous with secure access for remote workers, few if any of the vendors peddling the technology could deliver on Gartner’s full vision.

Security companies like Zscaler, Netskope, Bitglass, McAfee, and Cloudflare quickly embraced SASE despite lacking the WAN edge and SD-WAN capabilities required to support physical infrastructure like offices and retail locations. While many vendors dropped millions — verging on billions — of dollars on networking and security technologies to fill the gaps in their SASE lineup, none of these security vendors offer SD-WAN today.

Executives from Zscaler and McAfee have even pushed back against the idea of offering SD-WAN. “We believe that the notion that SASE means networking and security coming together is a misinterpretation of it,” Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry previously argued.

For vendors like Zscaler, Netskope, or McAfee, SSE offers more accurate depiction of what their products do and don’t encompass. SSE as a market matured faster than SASE, so “it made a lot of sense to do an SSE market guide,” Winckless said.

According to Winckless, enterprises that have closed their offices and gone fully remote have had the need for SD-WAN diminished if not completely eliminated. “That’s where SSE plays very strongly, and that’s where we see some of the leading SSE vendors who are not even considering SD-WAN organically as part of the solution,” he said.

However, Wood argues that in most cases, SSE won’t eliminate the need for SD-WAN entirely, adding that there are certain kinds of traffic that most SSE vendor’s aren’t well equipped to handle.

Common examples include voice-over-IP, unified communications (UC), collaboration, and real-time IoT traffic, he explained. “If they ... tell you not to send this to our PoPs, it's because they don’t offer an SD-WAN.”

But while some vendors may opt to ditch SD-WAN in the post-COVID world, Winckless believes that SSE will largely be deployed in conjunction with an existing or well-integrated SD-WAN platform. Large enterprises still favor distinct networking and security products, it just might not be a single vendor SASE architecture, he explained.