In its 2019 Hype Cycle report, Gartner called the secure access service edge (SASE) a transformational technology and made big claims about its potential to upend the security and SD-WAN markets. Despite these claims, not everyone is convinced.

The emerging technology described in Gartner's report stitches together elements of edge computing, security, and wide-area networking (WAN) into a single cloud-managed package. Gartner says the technology has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of on-premises hardware and complexity while enabling per-device visibility regardless of whether the user is connected via branch office or Starbucks WiFi.

However, analysts from IHS Markit and IDC aren't so sure SASE is the panacea that Gartner makes it out to be.

SASE doesn't feel like a new market, let alone a new technology or product, said Clifford Grossner, executive director of research and technology fellow at IHS Markit, in an email to SDxCentral.

“Not sure there is any real new technology. All we can see is an integration of existing technology,” he wrote. “This is simply edge computing, connectivity, and security with integrated management. [I] do not see this as a separate market as [it's] unlikely most enterprises will want to buy all this from one vendor.”

Grossner also criticized the lack of analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) techniques for automation at the edge, all of which he said appeared to be missing from Gartner's SASE definition.

Grossner isn't alone in this opinion.

In an interview with SDxCentral last month, IDC analyst Brandon Butler called SASE a Gartner marketing term, adding that it's IDC's belief that the SD-WAN will evolve into SD-branch.

Butler described SD-branch as an extension of SD-WAN that brings the same functionality into new aspects of the networks. “It’s really the idea of virtualizing other network and security functions that enterprises are using at the edge of their network,” he said.

Of the enterprises surveyed by IDC, Butler said many have expressed interest in deploying software-based versions of appliances like routers, switches, and firewalls. “But there are challenges to service chaining these applications together,” he said.

However, according to the Gartner report, service chaining is a practice best avoided when it comes to SASE. “This approach may speed time to market but will result in inconsistent services, poor manageability, and high latency,” the report reads.

And this isn't the only way SD-WAN and SASE differ fundamentally.

Despite skepticism, vendors haven’t been dissuaded from boarding Gartner’s hype train to SASE city.

Israel-based networking firm Cato Networks and San Francisco-based Infoblox are two of the first to stake a claim on the SASE market.

While Cato has been traditionally viewed as a security-focused SD-WAN vendor, SASE isn't exactly a new idea. David Greenfield, secure networking evangelist at Cato, said the company has been employing the technology's core principals as part of its SD-WAN offering for about five years.

Key to Cato’s claims is the distributed nature of its service, which features 47 points of presence (PoPs) located around the globe, each of which Greenfield says is running the company’s cloud-native software stack.

Cloud-native software and distributed networks are two important factors shared by many early entrants into the SASE market, including Infoblox, which is eyeing the opportunity following its acquisition of SnapRoute earlier this month.

But it’s not just smaller SD-WAN and networking security firms eyeing an entrance into the SASE market. SD-WAN powerhouse VMware claimed its VeloCloud SD-WAN was now a bonafide SASE platform.

“The days of hub-and-spoke MPLS networks that connect to a hardware-based perimeter are over,” said Sanjay Uppal, VP and GM of SD-WAN at VMware, in a statement. “VMware combines a unique hyperscale SD-WAN architecture spanning thousands of VMware SD-WAN Cloud Gateways with the most extensive ecosystem of third-party cloud services to deliver a consistent end-user experience as well as world-class security.”

Whether or not these vendor’s “SASE” platforms match Gartner’s definition remains to be seen.

When the 2019 Hype Cycle report was published in August, Gartner had identified 14 “representative providers” with a substantial subset of the necessary functionality that it anticipated would compete in the SASE space. However, Gartner reported that at the time none offered a complete SASE portfolio.

Gartner also suggested that at least one of the major public cloud providers — Amazon, Azure, 0r Google — would move into the market before long.

That said, the SASE market is still developing, and Gartner doesn’t expect that to change overnight. The analyst firm predicts the technology will take five to 10 years before it reaches mainstream adoption and during that time it is likely to undergo significant changes. Because of this, Gartner is cautioning early adopters to limit contracts to no more than two years and include acquisition protection clauses.