The secure access service edge (SASE) market will exceed $13 billion by 2026, a figure that will be unscathed by geopolitical or economic pressures, according to an updated five-year forecast from Dell’Oro Group.

“SASE revenue doubled from 2019 to 2021 and is expected to nearly triple by 2026 and enter double-digit billion territory,” Mauricio Sanchez, Dell’Oro research director, network security and SASE/SD-WAN told SDxCentral via email. “This is massive growth… while the strong growth trajectory of late 2020 and 2021 may be coming to an end, we have no expectation of any market collapse in the style of 2008 ‘Great Recession’ or the 2020 pandemic-induced chasm.”

The report breaks down the SASE market into two pools — SD-WAN and security services edge (SSE) — the latter is expected to double the revenue of SD-WAN in the total SASE market, according to Dell’Oro. 

Already in the first-quarter of this year, the SSE market grew 40% year-over-year and took in over $800 million. 

Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) all serve in the overall productivity and revenue in the SASE market, and specifically fall in the SSE pool.

While Dell’Oro predicts SWG and CASB will remain No. 1 in SSE’s cash flow, ZTNA and FaaS will still be emerging players, according to the report.

“In other words, FWaaS and ZTNA are the use cases that are expected to grow faster,” Sanchez wrote. “My expectation is that the double-digit, [billion-dollar] firewall appliance market will begin to get cannibalized in favor of cloud-delivered SASE security (SSE) variants.”

Single-vendor, or unified, SASE is also expected to trump multi-vendor, or disaggregated, SASE by 6x, according to Dell’Oro. 

“Today there’s only a handful of vendors that can claim unified SASE. However, I expect this to change as vendors build or buy their way into the unified space,” said Sanchez. “Like any single-vendor solution, there are tangible customer benefits — less operational burden, no finger pointing between vendors, tighter integration of components, clearer SLAs — . . . I expect that the unified portion will grow faster than disaggregated for this reason.”

Revenue-wise, however, unified type will not surpass the disaggregated type in SASE’s total revenue through 2025, according to a past SASE research report from Dell’Oro last September. This assumption still rings true, according to Sanchez.