The opportunities for managed secure access service edge (SASE) services are huge, with half of the 45% of enterprises expected to explore managed SASE options by 2025 likely to pursue single-vendor SASE solutions, according to Palo Alto Networks Senior Manager of Product Management Ron Ronco.

“Here at Palo Alto, we see a large percentage of our opportunities are actually SASE-related,” Ronco said during a webinar on Wednesday. A term coined by Gartner, he explained SASE seeks to bring networking capabilities via SD-WAN and security technologies via security services edge (SSE) together into one offering. From an Enterprise perspective, SASE constitutes transitioning stacks of firewalls sitting in edge locations across the globe to a thinner branch environment with a thick cloud environment, Ronco said.

While many vendors still can only supply components of SASE, Gartner recognizes nine that offer complete solutions with both networking and SSE capabilities – Cato Networks, Cisco, Citrix, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks, and VMware. By 2025, Gartner predicts 65% of enterprises will have consolidated individual SASE components into one or two explicitly partnered SASE vendors, up from 15% in 2021.

To that point, single-vendor SASE allows enterprises to deploy SD-WAN and security services like Cloud Access Security Broker, firewall-as-a-service, and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) using one cloud delivery service model, he explained.

The advent of SASE was driven in part by the coronavirus pandemic, which “changed everything when it comes to how you run and manage your IT infrastructure and how your end users consume and leverage that,” Ronco said. Chiefly, cybersecurity became crucial for every Enterprise as hybrid and remote working transitioned into the norm.

Still today “every CIO wakes up in the middle of the night probably saying, 'am I secure?',” Ronco said, touting SASE's ability to help executives sleep through the night.

SASE built on the foundational layers of ZTNA-grounded and cloud-delivered security services, SD-WAN's networking capabilities, and an exceptional user experience “helps deliver this type of security,” he said. The prevalence of enterprises operating in hybrid models means it's even more crucial for user experience to be part of a SASE offering. If that's “not part of the puzzle, you're missing out big time,” he said.