Returning home after a long day at the office used to be a reprieve, but today, the lines between office and home have been blurred beyond recognition. “It used to be ‘there’s no place like home,’ now it's more like ‘no place but home,’” wrote Jean-Luc Valente, VP of product management for Cisco’s SD-WAN and edge routing division, in a blog post Wednesday.

In the face of the pandemic, enterprises moved quickly to transition their employees to remote work. But while many efforts to deploy remote access technologies like VPNs, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), or secure access service edge (SASE) have been effective in the short term, Valente argues the situation is still far from perfect.

“Our home WiFi is overloaded with internet-dependent work, school, and play applications, causing more than a few eye-rolls as application performance slows to a crawl and video conversations are peppered with static,” he wrote, painting the home office as the wild west when it comes to IT management. “Individuals have limited options to speed up their home office connectivity."

While this is unlikely to change for the vast number of remote workers, Valente argues that enterprises have an opportunity to address these issues for “high-value, customer-facing workers.”

“What was once ‘good enough’ for occasional evening and weekend work at home stints is no longer adequate,” he wrote.

This is where SD-WAN appliances come in. While many enterprises adopted technologies like VPNs or ZTNA to provide secure access to application in the data center or cloud, they only address part of the problem and don’t do anything for slow, congested, or over-provisioned broadband connections.

Valente makes the case that for certain employees it can make sense to deploy enterprise hardware like SD-WAN appliances in the home, not only to mitigate disruptions and keep workers productive, but to extend security beyond company-issued devices to the LAN and enable application-level quality of service. Once the SD-WAN appliance is deployed, the employees home can be treated like any other branch office, allowing IT teams to apply policy consistently across various business segments.

While SD-WAN appliances in the home may be a boon for IT, Valente writes that they also need to be transparent to the employee.

SASE, Gartner’s hot new product category, combines the best parts of SD-WAN with cloud-delivered security functionality like secure web gateways, ZTNA, and cloud access security brokers (CASB). SASE’s low barrier to entry, subscription pricing model, and software endpoint made it a relatively painless alternative to VPNs or expensive SD-WAN appliances.

In many ways, the pandemic was responsible for catapulting the adoption of SASE into the spotlight far sooner than many had expected. This led vendors like Palo Alto Networks, VMware, Fortinet, Versa, and of course Cisco to develop and launch SASE offerings of their own.

While SD-WAN is a part of the SASE offering, it's usually associated with branch connectivity rather than remote access. But as Valente, and others like Fortinet’s CMO John Maddison, have pointed out repeatedly over the past year, SD-WAN appliances still have a place in the home office, at least for certain workers.

One of Maddison’s criticisms of a purely software approach to remote work is that without an appliance, SASE can only secure the connection between the user’s computer or mobile to the application. It doesn’t protect the rest of the user’s home network.

And from the employee’s perspective, a SASE endpoint running on their work computer can’t do anything about their children or spouses virtual lessons or Zoom calls chewing up what limited bandwidth is available.

Finally, SD-WAN appliances often can be outfitted with cellular connectivity for employees with poor or unreliable internet connectivity.

Despite the inherent advantages offered by SD-WAN appliances, hardware-dependent vendors’ — like Cisco and Fortinet — could be more financially motivated.

Late last year, Dell’Oro Group Research Director Mauricio Sanchez, predicted that at least initially the majority of SASE revenues would be driven by appliance sales, with software only gaining majority share by 2024.

“It’s clear cut, by the end of the forecast, the revenue associated with just the cloud-hosted portion of the SASE solution — delivered purely from the cloud, not through the appliance that sits on-prem — is going to be the majority share,” Sanchez said, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral.