A majority of organizations prefer security services edge (SSE) architecture that leverages public cloud in some way, Axis Security’s research found. And the SSE vendor also predicts the need for SD-WAN will decline.

Axis claims that in the next 24 months, 65% of organizations plan to adopt SSE – the set of cloud-delivered security services that, when unified with SD-WAN, comprise Gartner-coined secure access service edge (SASE) framework.

SSE vendors today have to provide a complete SSE platform with zero-trust network access (ZTNA), cloud-access security broker (CASB), and secure web gateway (SWG), and also have an internet protocol security (IPSec) VPN to integrate with any SD-WAN provider, Axis VP Chris Hines explained.

But in the next year or so, Hines expects to see SSE vendors start to “invest in technologies that will even negate the need for SD-WAN all together.”

“Having a backbone built on public cloud is actually really attractive,” Hines told SDxCentral.

While Hines said the term “hybrid” has been overused in the market, the new reality of dispersed users and more branch locations can’t be ignored. “All those branches, they all have different levels of needs – some have users, some have printers and IoT devices,” he added. “The whole reality here is you’re not going to have to require a full SD-WAN or network stack at every single location.”

Some branch offices with what Hines called “heavier needs” will continue to need some SD-WAN connectivity, but he maintains that moving forward, the market will start to see “less and less of the SD-WAN needs, as the SSE vendors become smarter about the technologies that they offer at the branch.”

“All you're doing is forwarding traffic to the SSE servers at the end of the day anyway. The majority of that traffic isn't even going to the data center anymore. It's going out to the Internet,” he said. “So the need for SD-WAN is going to become lesser, despite what people might be saying today, and that's really important for people to think through going forward.”

Public cloud and local edges lead SSE success

To lower costs and complexity that come with connecting branch offices over MPLS to a data center, Hines said, there will be a shift to a model “almost like the Internet cafe,” where branch offices are internet-based and users connect to endpoint agents deployed from an SSE service for internal and external traffic.

The public cloud offers a “scale factor and speed factor” and the ability to connect to local edges in areas that have poor infrastructure and low Internet reliability, according to Hines.

“They need localized edges because they can’t be reliant on Internet access or getting out to the Internet to come back in when the Internet isn’t functioning properly – there’s compliance needs behind that as well,” he said. “A key pillar of what's going to define success in SSE is public and local edge, and big investment in public cloud helps do that quite a bit.”