Security has become the killer app, but communications service providers (CSPs) should be cautious not to fixate on the emerging secure access service edge (SASE) market, warns Appledore Research in an SD-WAN report.

While the Gartner-coined product category has seen widespread adoption among SD-WAN and security vendors alike, Grant Lenahan, principal analyst at Appledore Research, argues SASE does little to address the most systemic cause of security breaches: user error.

"The evidence from the non-commercial players, law enforcement, and other places is that about 90% of all breaches are a result of human error and misconfigurations,” he said, arguing that automation is the best weapon and SD-WAN’s greatest strength in combatting this challenge.

When SD-WAN first hit the market, it was really about allowing customers to use multiple networks as one, Lenahan said. “And then along came COVID-19, SASE, a focus on cybersecurity and they’ve all rotated to, ‘oh no it's really my SASE platform,' and they forgot about all the other things [SD-WAN] does.”

So while SASE's security capabilities may address many of the current challenges that enterprises face — remote work and cloud adoption being two — SD-WAN’s role in combatting security threats shouldn’t be understated, he said.

The shift toward a SASE architecture was just one of the many trends identified in the report. Appledore also called out market consolidation fueled in part by SD-WAN and security vendors vying to fill gaps in their respective portfolios.

“The major players have, with very few exceptions, been acquired by larger vendors with complimentary assets,” Lenahan wrote. “Today, our estimates show the top eight vendors control [around] 80% of the market for SD-WAN.”

This consolidation has helped to address one of the biggest challenges facing enterprises as they look to adopt SD-WAN services: inconsistent definitions, the report found.

“SD-WAN is largely unstandardized, and therefore can be defined in any way convenient for the vendor, user, or observer,” Lenahan wrote, adding that market consolidation has helped to even out some of these differences and contributed to a “degree of uniformity” and sophistication, at least among market leaders.

These trends have in some cases resulted in what the report calls “sub-optimal vendor choices” on the part of CSPs and enterprises. This is evidenced by vendor preference forcing CSPs to offer shallower support for multiple vendors rather than tightly integrating with a select few.

“Our research indicates that many larger network operators are supporting a continuous range of SD-WAN technologies,” the report reads. “Ostensibly, this is to provide choice, yet the real driver appears to be enterprises arriving at their sales door pre-sold by one of the leading technology vendors.”

Lenahan argues this is a boon for the overall market, but a challenge for CSPs trying to simplify, deepen, and improve their SD-WAN offerings. “If they now have to support four different solutions, they have either four times the work, or one quarter the depth and sophistication on each one.”

As a result, CSPs are at risk of losing control of network choices to the SD-WAN vendors, and/or being forced to deploy and re-sell SD-WAN services with little in terms of differentiation, the report warns.

With that said, Appledore is tracking several CSPs that have leaned into SD-WAN to build new portfolios that embrace third-party capabilities. This includes developing internal APIs to encourage third-party vendors to join their ecosystems while building API bridges to popular services like the public cloud providers.

For CSPs to be successful, they’re going to have to integrate with third parties, Lenahan said. “The public cloud isn't going away, vertical-market applications that may be in public or private cloud are not going away, and if we ever believe that this term digital service is going to happen, that's how it's gonna happen.”

Looking ahead, Appledore expects the SD-WAN market will continue to see strong growth over the next several years. The research group forecasts the SD-WAN services market, which includes both service provider managed and integrated services, will reach a minimum of $22 billion and a maximum of $41 billion by 2027.

Appledore notes this is a slight decline from prior forecasts due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic forcing CSPs to reevaluate their strategies. Despite this, “CSPs continue to gain share as the managed services players of choice,” Lenahan wrote.

Meanwhile, Appledore forecasts the SD-WAN software market, will reach near $7 billion and could jump as high as $12 billion during the same period.