The robust secure access service edge (SASE) market revenue is expected to surpass $10 billion by the end of 2024, but its high growth rate might begin to slow, Mauricio Sanchez, senior research director for Enterprise networking and security market at Dell’Oro Group, told SDxCentral.

“I expect that SASE will continue to show growth in 2024, though at a slightly lower rate than in 2023,” Sanchez said. “Even so, revenue is expected to crack through $10 billion for the full year 2024, representing more than a doubling of the total market in three years.”

According to a recent report from Dell’Oro Group, the overall SASE market, which consists of SD-WAN and security services edge (SSE) solutions, saw a 3% revenue increase to $2.2 billion in the third quarter of 2023, which set a new record. Meanwhile, the SSE and SD-WAN portions of the market have nearly doubled in the last ten quarters, indicating a strong demand from both networking and security sides.

The firm also projected in the report that the market would grow 33% to reach $8.5 billion in revenue for the full year 2023, and 25% to reach $10.6 billion in 2024.

“Key drivers remain the transformation of the Enterprise to align with the new normal of hybrid work and cloud-based applications that require strong security and networking capabilities,” Sanchez said.

However, due to concerns that SASE sales cycles are longer than in the past and customers are demanding higher contractual discounts because of the challenging macroeconomic conditions, there is a real possibility that the SASE market's high growth rates will begin to slow this year, Dell'Oro Group noted in the report.

Sanchez analyzed the SASE market from three different lenses: by technology (SD-WAN vs. SSE), by class (multivendor vs. single vendor), and by implementation (unified vs. disaggregated technology stack).

He identified HPE Aruba, Aryaka, Cato Networks, Check Point, Cisco, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Netskope, Versa Networks and VMware as vendors that offer single-vendor SASE, which includes both SD-WAN and SSE.

“The data undeniably points to single vendors representing a large portion of the SASE market and growing faster,” Sanchez noted. The single-vendor SASE solutions have seen a year-over-year growth of nearly 60%, representing over half of the SASE market in the third quarter, the report showed.

“However, Zscaler has been an exception. They are the largest SASE vendor and have been growing at remarkable rates even as a multivendor SASE,” he said.

Zscaler overtook Cisco in the first quarter of 2023 to claim the No. 1 revenue spot for the first time since Dell’Oro Group began tracking the SASE market in 2019. In the second quarter of 2023, Cisco regained the crown with a 17.3% revenue share. Then, Zscaler reclaimed the top position in the third quarter, becoming the first vendor to exceed $400 million in quarterly revenue.

Other revenue leaders in the market include Palo Alto Networks, Broadcom (Symantec) and Fortinet. The top five single-vendor SASE vendors for the third quarter were Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Netskope and Versa Networks, according to the firm.

Sanchez expects Zscaler and Cisco to remain in their leadership positions this year. “Outside of Cisco, I don’t see anyone else in 2024 being able to dethrone Zscaler from its leadership position, assuming no massive vendor consolidation or missteps on the part of Zscaler.”

Zscaler and Cisco were also named as the top one and four SSE vendors in the report, respectively. Together with Broadcom (Symantec), Palo Alto Networks and Netskope, the top five vendors accounted for 74% of the SSE market by revenue.

In addition, the global SSE market jumped 34% in year-over-year revenue to $1.3 billion in the third quarter of 2023, according to Dell’Oro Group.

This year, Sanchez expects to see more innovations in the SSE market. “The elasticity and cloud-indigenousness of SSEs are allowing vendors to innovate on their cloud-based platforms and offer new services.”

In addition to core capabilities such as zero-trust network access (ZTNA), firewall-as-a-service (FaaS), secure web gateway (SWG) and Cloud Access Security Broker, he pointed to data loss prevention and network/application performance management (APM) as areas that will continue to evolve in 2024.

“Some SSE vendors, notably those with a strong networking pedigree, are also innovating on the networking side with cloud networking offerings that can replace traditional middle-mile transport networks,” Sanchez added.