BROOMFIELD, Colorado – The MEF Technology Advisory Board sat on a panel this week to talk through confusion around the secure access service edge (SASE) and SD-WAN markets. As part of the 2022 MEF Members Meeting, the panel discussed how MEF service standards can help provide common language and expectations to help speed up market growth. 

“Everyone's trying to jump on the hype cycle of SASE,” VMWare’s general manager of SASE business, Craig Connors said, which he added is ascribable to emerging work-from-home use cases coupled with the rise of connected IoT devices and modernized applications distributing across networks. “You have all sorts of different companies saying that they have a SASE solution when they're missing this piece, or this piece, or this piece. And that just further leads to the confusion in the market.”

When Gartner’s response to the confusion was another new term, security services edge (SSE), it only heightened the problem, Connors said. 

“Every customer I speak to has a different opinion of what SASE is,” Fortinet CMO John Maddison added. “It started with 30 different things, and now it's down to five.” Maddison admitted he sees SASE as a “buzz term” that unfortunately, everyone doesn't quite understand.

But despite the chaos around what SASE and SSE parameters are exactly, the panel was in agreement that the convergence of networking and security is now critical. 

Sunil Khandekar, former founder and CEO of Nuage Networks, said to reach convergence, the industry cannot make the same mistake it did with SD-WAN. “SD-WAN was the first mainstream service that became mainstream without any standardizing bodies getting involved and defining it,” he said. 

The lack of standardization within the early SD-WAN market led to an “arms race of features and functions that every vendor went to the market with,” Khandekar added. He credits MEF with taking a leadership position to define and standardize SD-WAN, and said it helped vendors and service providers start to certify against the services and definitions MEF created.

“Unfortunately, there were no standardized bodies that came together to define what SASE is and so what happened is analysts, predominantly Gartner, filled that vacuum and defined it,” Khandekar explained. Now, he said he’s looking to MEF to move the term toward standardization.

“Let's not go back to when I was in telecom 25 years ago and we waited 10 years before standards were built – and we built first and then they were validated,” Maddison said in agreement. 

Without standardization, Connors said the industry becomes limited to single vendor solutions. Incompatible ecosystems between vendors lead to the illusion that there is market differentiation when in reality, it only means they are peddling incomplete SASE solutions. 

The industry needs to “define some base functionality, some common terms that everybody can understand and refer to,” Khandekar said. “And then we can start defining and differentiating on top of that, but that has to happen for us to have some ability to influence the way we can, on a sustained basis, have some sort of interoperability in the ecosystems that we participate in.”

The panel agreed standardization is key to dissolving customer confusion and presenting vendors with a framework for SASE, but establishing certification frameworks has been neglected because it makes it difficult for some practitioners to compete. 

Spirent CTO Dave Larson explained that there's a balance between a collegial behavior among the industry – in which he “wants everyone” to pass certification – and the reality that without failures to point at, the benefit certification brings to the market is diminished. “We don't push for corner case evaluation right now,” he added. “The push is for the lowest common denominator, everybody gets a passing grade. That's okay. Right now we're early, but we need to start upping our game with respect to the certifications.” 

Larson said there has to be a demand from the provider, operator, and Enterprise community to drive for best-in-class differentiation among competing entities in the market. Certifications will hold more strength, he added, and only then will the industry be ready to focus on technology gaps.