LAS VEGAS, NV – Secure access service edge (SASE) is still Gartner's golden child technology, with expectations that total worldwide end-user spending on SASE will reach $9.2 billion in 2023, marking a 39% increase from 2022.

The analysis firm predicts 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private Application access using a SASE/security services edge (SSE) architecture by 2025, up from 20% in 2021.

The analyst firm coined SASE in 2019 as a technology framework for the convergence of network access and security in cloud-native environments. Gartner now recommends enterprises invest in SASE products “opportunistically at refresh if you’re increasingly leveraging cloud services,” Analyst Andrew Lerner said during Gartner's infrastructure and operations (I&O) cloud strategies conference.

“If you're coming to a Gartner presentation on networking innovation, and you thought you weren't going to get a slide on SASE, then you are sadly mistaken,” he added.

Alongside universal zero-trust network access (ZTNA), network-as-a-service (networking-as-a-service (NaaS)), multicloud networking software (MCNS), and NetDevOps, SASE is a key network innovation because “users are increasingly distributed. That's not new, but they're more distributed than they've been, and applications are more distributed than they've ever been,” Lerner said.

The way enterprises have secured access to distributed apps and users is through an SD-WAN vendor, a secure web gateway vendor, a firewall vendor, a ZTNA vendor, and so on. “It's very common to see people with 6 to 8 vendors, and each one of them has a console, a dashboard, a policy engine, and a place for you to define apps,” Lerner said.

That creates what's known as swivel chair administrative inefficiency, “but that's kind of the world we live in. It's not efficient,” he admitted. SASE solves these issues by converging all networking functions into one offering. “That's a big difference from how we used to do things,” Lerner added.

SASE is also highlighted as a top trend set to impact I&O leaders in the coming year. “Leaders are going to be looking at this and saying, we want to implement this,” Gartner Analyst Jeffrey Hewitt said. “They’re going to be assessing and determining what providers can offer.”