Gartner’s first-ever Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) sheds light on the adoption state, competitive landscape, trends and its future trajectory. With more SASE vendors expected to enter the single-vendor market, the race is on.
What counts as a single-vendor SASE?The analysis firm defines single-vendor SASE as solutions that offer multiple converged-network and security-as-a-service capabilities, including SD-WAN, secure web gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker, network firewalling and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) delivered by one vendor.
“In its simplest form, [it] is full SASE offering all components from a single provider,” Gartner Distinguished VP Andrew Lerner, who is one of the report authors, told SDxCentral. “Not just do it with five disparate products, but with some degree of common management and policy and integration.”
For this Magic Quadrant, Gartner's inclusion criteria included clear integration between components and simplified and centralized management with no more than three consoles, he added.
Gartner estimates 7,500 Enterprise single-vendor SASE customersCurrently, smaller and mid-market organizations are leading the charge for SASE adoption.
There are about 7,500 Enterprise single-vendor SASE customers, while the number is estimated to range from 8,000 to 15,000 for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Single-vendor adoption accounts for around 10% to 20% of the overall SASE market, according to Lerner.
“Today when we talk to organizations who are actively investing in SASE, it tends to be smaller and mid-market organizations in healthcare and finance and manufacturing and in retail,” Lerner said. “It is because they're less siloed, the teams are smaller, there's less kind of political challenges, so it's easier to absorb the technologies”
Larger enterprises are also expressing interest, but face challenges related to technology scale and organizational complexity.
“Larger organizations even Fortune 100 or Global 2000 are absolutely calling us regularly asking us: How do we get this SASE? We're not ready to buy everything from one vendor today, but we want to get there to simplify our state,” he said, adding going forward, the SASE adoption will spread to larger and larger organizations across multiple verticals.
Single-vendor SASE on the riseThe single-vendor SASE market is undergoing rapid changes, with a more than 50% jump in the number of vendors expected by 2025, compared to mid-2023, according to the report.
Gartner analysts expect five to 10 new vendors will enter the market over the next 18 months.
“There are several vendors today that have offerings for single-vendor SASE but that they're not quite ready, they're not quite generally available,” Lerner said.
He added: “I expect most of the SSE vendors will become single vendor SASE.” For example, the leading security services edge (SSE) Zscaler is expanding its portfolios to include network capabilities, announcing a hardware appliance at the Zenith Live 2023 event,
“It's a very reasonable speculation to think that they'll go forward and expand on that, but we don't have any specific knowledge of that, but it certainly looks like they would be trending in that direction,” Lerner noted.
On the other hand, most of the single-vendor SASE vendors are open to dual- or multi-vendor approaches, enabling customers to buy SASE from multiple providers, he added.
Palo Alto Networks the only leader, Gartner saysIn the Magic Quadrant for single-vendor SASE report, Gartner identified Palo Alto Networks as the only leader. Cato Networks, Versa Networks and Fortinet are listed challengers. Cisco and Forcepoint are labeled as visionaries, and VMware and Juniper Networks as cited as niche players.
Lerner point to Palo Alto Networks’ strength in three areas:
- The security giant has the largest customer base among the vendors in the report by far with around 3,000 customers, which gives them a huge head start for SASE business.
- Palo Alto Networks is one of the only three vendors in the report that offers a unified management platform for all security policies and the interface is “relatively straightforward, easy to use and intuitive.”
- The vendor shows a strong roadmap with various potential product innovations including “leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) [AI] and ML[machine learning (ML)] and generative AI to improve an operational experience, a conversational UI if you will, a digital assistant to help you with automation and policy and troubleshooting.”
Gartner listed Check Point Software, Cloudflare, Cradlepoint, HPE (Aruba), and Netskope as honorable mentions, meaning they didn’t meet the inclusion criteria as of the research cutoff date of April 12, 2023.
Check Point recently added SD-WAN capabilities to its portfolio to offer single-vendor SASE, but it didn’t meet the customer number requirement by the cutoff date, Lerner noted.
Other vendors on the list also made similar moves, including Cloudflare launching branch appliances, Cradlepoint acquiring cloud security vendor Ericom, HPE (Aruba) buying SSE vendor Axis Security and Netskope acquiring cloud-networking vendor Infiot.
“This market is dynamic. It's moving fast. So it would not at all surprise us, based on the pace of the market and the dynamics of the market, [if] next year there were 12 or 13 vendors [included in the report] and even if there are vendors from this year that don't even make it to next year,” Lerner said.
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