Dell’Oro Group predicts total secure access service edge (SASE) revenue will surpass $60 billion between 2022 and 2027, with small and midsize businesses (SMB) driving unified SASE revenue.

The analyst firm said in its latest predictions unified SASE revenue is anticipated to grow 5x during that period.

There are two designations dividing the SASE landscape, Dell'Oro Group Research Director Mauricio Sanchez said. The first being a focus on single-vendor versus multi-vendor solutions, and the second being a differentiation between unified and disaggregated products, which indicates whether the network and security stacks in a SASE solution are fully integrated.

Larger enterprises have been quick to adopt technologies requisite to a SASE framework, Sanchez added, but they also tend to buy separate networking and security products.

“It really seems to have turned out that some of those large enterprises reacted to the hybrid work and they've invested heavily in security services edge (SSE) [SSE],” he told SDxCentral. “And now they're gonna do SD-WAN, so they're at different points of the journey.”

Other large enterprises have gone the opposite route, investing in networking first and then moving on to SSE technology, or what Gartner calls the “security side of SASE.” Either way they approach the SASE journey, these larger enterprises are moving with the expectation “that they're going to be able to link them up eventually and create workflows between those two sides of the coin,” Sanchez noted.

By contrast, SMB and mid-market enterprises haven't embraced SASE technology quite yet, with Sanchez calling them the “laggards in this space.”

These smaller enterprises can’t hold out on SASE for long, and there's a “significant amount of untapped market” waiting for them. He expects that slice of the market will continue to grow specifically on the back of service providers who can offer managed and co-managed unified SASE services.

“That class of solution is very appealing to that class of mid-market and SMB, who like simplicity,” Sanchez explained. “There’s more of the willingness to buy this notion of unified.”

Hype around the unified and single-vendor labels has sent companies “turning themselves into pretzels” trying to apply both titles to their SASE solutions, Sanchez said.

“I think what everyone is doing is self-fulfilling to try to push themselves into becoming both,” he explained. “Everyone wants to become single-vendor, everyone wants to become unified,” but as vendors search for ways to “rationalize how they should be categorized into each class,” he maintains the market isn’t going to be won by single-vendor or unified solutions.

Instead, there will continue to be room for multi-vendor and disaggregated SASE products, because different models will work for each Enterprise based on their unique requirements. As Sanchez pointed out, “of course, there are pros and cons to both of those implementation types.”

While SASE growth is expected to continue, Sanchez expects a “digestion period” is nigh.

This is in part because enterprises have bought so much technology in the last few years and it's started to flood in as supply chain issues ease. “People bought so much that they need to figure out how to deploy it and get through the bumper crop of technology that they're now working through,” he said.

Security and IT teams are also tightening their belts as a proactive measure against a possible recession, which could portend a slowdown in SASE growth. Even so, Sanchez maintains that SASE is in better shape than other network and security spaces, and the market is still “very healthy overall.”

“I don't want to sound like it's gonna be a cliff drop, because it's not,” Sanchez said. “It just means that the growth curve is expected to show a little bit of a bend, and then the growth rates will continue to keep going. It just means that the frenzied pace of growth is going to decelerate a little bit, slow down, and then it will even out and continue to march forward.”