There's no question the Gartner-coined secure access service edge (SASE) architecture is hot. How hot? White hot, according to a report out of Dell'Oro Group this week.

The firm expects the SASE market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 116%, attaining a market value of $5.1 billion by 2024.

"SASE isn't necessarily a completely new technology, but its integration of existing technologies in a differentiated way," said Mauricio Sanchez, research director at Dell'Oro Group, in a call with SDxCentral. SASE architecture ties together elements of networking, security, and edge compute into a single cloud-delivered offering.

SD-WAN, secure web gateways (SWG), and firewalls are the technologies to watch when it comes to SASE, according to Sanchez.

SASE is "the intersection of these three markets. It's not necessarily true that these three markets are going to converge fully," he said. "It's a fallacy to say that SASE is equivalent to the sum of the ongoing SD-WAN, secure web gateway, and firewall technologies."

Near-term growth in the SASE market will be driven in large part by small to midsized business, Sanchez said.

"Those are the guys that are typically the most hamstrung in terms of IT staffing and resources," he said. "In many cases, SASE is a form of an easy button. ... It's predominantly an ease of use play."

By comparison, Sanchez expects large enterprises to pivot to SASE much more slowly.

"The problem is that not every enterprise is ready to have everything integrated into a cloud-based package from one vendor," he said.

However, the research firm predicts that fundamental changes in the way companies do business — including a permanent transition to remote work as a norm, as well as the increased use of software-as-a-service applications — will drive adoption of SASE platforms across the board in the long run.

Adoption isn't the only metric that Sanchez expects to change over the next five years. He also predicts software will be the primary driver of SASE revenues by the end of 2024.

"Not terribly surprising, when looking at the forecast from a software versus hardware perspective, software rules the roost across our forecast horizon," he said.

The majority of SASE revenues will eventually, like in the security and SD-WAN markets, come from hardware, according to Dell'Oro Group.

"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.

More than 27 vendors have adopted SASE in some capacity since Gartner coined the category in August 2019.  However, "a lot of the vendors aren't necessarily providing all the components under a single banner," he said.

While it isn't strictly necessary for vendors to provide both the networking and security stack, the vendors that can are at a distinct advantage, Sanchez explained.

For example, security vendor Zscaler has chosen to partner with SD-WAN vendors to satisfy SASE's networking demands, while vendors like Cato Networks have built both their networking and security stack entirely in house.

"In the report, we say vendors who are able to provide everything under the same umbrella are likely to stand out," he said, adding that SASE is still an emerging market and that some enterprises may prefer a multi-vendor SASE offering.