Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have typically shown different strategies for secure access service edge (SASE) compared to their larger counterparts. And vendors like Aryaka are taking notice, moving fast to specialize their portfolios to the demands of smaller enterprises that have so far been “laggards” in SASE adoption.

Aryaka Chief Product Officer Renuka Nadkarni said the vendor has seen a lot of interest from SMEs who are familiar with SASE, Gartner’s framework for a cloud-based convergence of networking and security, as it can help address the challenges smaller businesses tend to face the most: cost optimization, operational efficiency, and ease of management.

“It's actually a trifecta effect,” Nadkarni said. “You don't have skilled resources. You are trying to have online digital transformation. All of that is happening with limited budgets and you need something which works through and through with operational simplicity, instead of having multiple disjoint solutions connected.”

Aryaka recently announced enhanced SD-WAN and SASE products specifically designed to meet the needs of SMEs, most notably, with a new entry pricing of under $150 per site.

This announcement comes on the heels of Aryaka in February announcing enhancements to its SD-WAN and a point-of-presence (PoP) expansion, Klaus Schwegler, director of marketing at Aryaka, noted.

At the time, the vendor saw the SD-WAN and PoP upgrades as a “perfect match” for SMEs based on the challenges they face, Schwegler told SDxCentral. But the February announcements didn’t get much traction.

Since then, Schwegler said Aryaka has “sharpened the pencils, if you will, made it a very affordable price point for offering for the small and medium sized enterprises, and that's where we are now.”

After Gartner coined the term in 2019, the earliest SASE products came in the form of multiple vendors stitching together security and networking portfolios “put together with bandaids just holding these things barely together,” Nadkarni said.

“What happens is when you connect these things together, it causes disjointed architecture. And when one thing goes down, or if there is no connectivity between the user and the application, you need to know which piece of it is broken. So it's extremely complex troubleshooting,” she added.

Large enterprises typically still have separate teams for networking and security, and sometimes even have different budgets for the two, Schwegler said. These companies have been quick to adopt technologies needed for a SASE framework, but often they’ve bought them as disaggregated networking and security products.

Conversely, SASE has been a difficult venture for smaller enterprises with limited resources and most haven’t been confident enough to take the leap.

“If you think about it, SMEs actually should be ideally positioned for SASE adoption and consumption because they don't have the time and the resources to fully understand all the intricate details of SASE and what it does,” Schwegler said.

SMEs are confronted with the challenges of a hybrid workforce, more applications and workloads in the cloud, sites that they need to connect as well as remote users who connect to the sites, the multiple workloads and multiple SaaS applications. “I need to protect it without a full understanding of the many, many elements of SASE. That is complex,” Schwegler added.

However, with the SASE market in its fourth year and maturing at high speed, vendors like Aryaka are approaching the market with single-vendor, unified SASE portfolios. Nadkarni said these products are drawing SMEs into the SASE market, as they enable “quality security without investing in a lot of personnel and equipment.”

“You're making this kind of technology available to the masses. Now anybody and everybody in the mid-market SME section can have the same kind of security posture that you would have at a bank,” she added.

Dell’Oro Research Director Mauricio Sanchez previously called SMEs the “laggards” in the SASE space, but said there’s a “significant amount of untapped market" waiting for them.

The research firm predicts total SASE revenue will surpass $60 billion between 2022 and 2027, and Sanchez expects small and midsize businesses (SMB) will drive SASE revenue, specifically on the backs of service providers who can offer managed unified SASE services.

And according to Nadkarni, Aryaka’s SME customers are indeed focused on the benefits that come with unified and managed SASE services. “On the SME side of things, they're really struggling with how do I make this thing work together? I want connectivity. I want secure network connectivity, and I just want operational simplicity to begin with,” she said.

With Gartner expected to soon release its first Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE, Aryaka also expects SASE adoption among SMEs will swell fast.

“In smaller companies, they're usually integrated and the decision making is faster. So the adoption of these integrated solutions is faster,” Nadkarni said. “It's definitely going to be very positive for us.”