Dell’Oro Group expects enterprises will continue to prioritize the security side of secure access service edge (SASE), but “slow down the networking side as the economic pressure increases,” according to Research Director Mauricio Sanchez.

While the SD-WAN market should expect continued growth this year, its rate of growth has slowed since high demand in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, and will start to experience “some level of modulation,” Sanchez explained.

He also noted that the spike in demand during that time has left vendors still dealing with backlogs, which might be acting as a buffer in preserving the rate of growth for the SD-WAN market.

By contrast, Dell’Oro Group foresees the security side of SASE, security services edge (SSE), will post another year of solid growth in 2023. Enterprises are “still chasing to ensure that they've got the best position for the security implications of hybrid work,” Sanchez said, adding “a lot of enterprises are still a bit behind.”

As enterprises tightening their belts will prioritize SSE over the need to invest aggressively on the networking side, “the savvy vendor will play both cards,” he said.

This means SD-WAN vendors without SSE capabilities will have to partner with security vendors more aggressively, and vendors with security and networking capabilities will “gravitate toward accentuating the security side.”

“I do see the need for the SD-WAN vendors to up their security game as table stakes to ensure that they take their share of the SD-WAN opportunity,” Sanchez said.

Dell’Oro Group also indicated its prediction from the beginning of 2022 was correct, and that in the last 12 months “only a minority of enterprises will fully deploy SASE in 2022,” but all will force their vendors to have a SASE option.

“SASE, an architectural IT direction to transform and unify WAN-centric networking and security for branches and remote users, continued to gain interest and traction,” Sanchez wrote in a blog.

“However, how the enterprises deployed SASE networking versus security technologies remained extremely disaggregated and on different timelines due to the difficulty of changing too many parts simultaneously,” he added.

As predicted, vendors in the last year had to demonstrate to customers that they could help them on their SASE journey today and into the future even if customers “didn’t yet take advantage” of the technology.

Sanchez attributes this to several factors, among them that the SASE framework and technologies are still relatively new.

“You've got brownfield technologies that you're having to deal with and replace over time,” he said. “It's a marathon, not a sprint where you can automatically rip-and-replace everything.”

What’s more, many IT shops in large enterprises still have separate networking and security teams, making it difficult to achieve consolidation – the ultimate goal of the SASE framework. “It's not always the same vendor that happens to be the favorite vendor for either networking or security,” he said. “The fact that you have that separation introduces an initial obstacle to being able to bring these worlds together.”

But Sanchez granted that over the past year, there has been “a palpable shift in terms of the two teams collaborating and working closer together.”

“These are teams that understand from the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) down that hey, the world is shifting so that these workflows between networking security need to continue to come together,” he added. “It makes sense for purposes of both the remote access and the branch transformation side, so that is happening. And I think it's just a maturity thing that will take some time to continue to evolve.”