Security Services Edge (SSE) and secure access service edge (SASE) posted robust growth during the first quarter of this year, highlighting increased Enterprise adoption of cloud-delivered security services, according to a recent Dell'Oro Group report.

The report found that the SSE market grew 40% year-over-year to more than $800 million in the first quarter. Dell’Oro Research Director of Network Security, SASE, and SD-WAN Mauricio Sanchez said the strong growth is a testament to more enterprises preferring cloud-delivered security over traditional on-premises solutions. 

“The growth factors that have existed largely since the pandemic started are still with us,” Sanchez told SDxCentral. “That's the shift to hybrid work, the shift of workloads to the cloud, and the importance of the digital experience.” 

Dell’Oro found that total SASE networking and security revenue approached $1.5 billion for the quarter and experienced 30% year-over-year growth. Despite continued supply chain concerns, SD-WAN revenue also grew more than 20%. 

The report numbers parallel those released earlier this year from industry association MEF predicting the SD-WAN and SASE markets will see double-digit growth in 2022, despite abundant challenges impacting market efficiencies and growth.

The Dell'Oro report also found firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) and zero-trust network access (ZTNA) revenues cumulatively more than doubled. However, Sanchez attributed slower growth of secure web gateway (SWG) and Cloud Access Security Broker revenues, which cumulatively grew just under 30%, to the already large share of the market the two technologies have occupied for years. 

Sanchez said the report is an indication to vendors that the market is “moving in a direction of consolidation.” Enterprises are looking to buy cloud-delivered security as a platform that includes at least those core four functions. “That's probably the key message; is that the table stakes are shifting,” he added. Vendors that don't have the full set of capabilities may be at “a competitive disadvantage” to those that are now able to offer a fuller SSE solution.

When Gartner coined SSE late last year, it begged the question of whether anything had really changed since the conception of its parent acronym, SASE. Sanchez said these new acronyms can cause confusion and be disruptive in the near term. 

“If an Enterprise procurement person is already thinking, I gotta buy this, and then something shows up differently in the market, then they start naturally thinking well, instead of what I thought I needed to buy, maybe I need to buy this other thing,” he explained. 

Sanchez said that these acronyms can inform a path forward to the convergence of networking and security, and that despite any initial confusion, the growth of these markets is likely to stay elevated.

“My expectation is it will outstrip the growth in firewalls, which has been recently elevated but starting to modulate down,” he said. “I expect that SSE will continue to be twice if not up to three-times faster than the usual bellwether that the firewall market has seen over the last 20 years in network security space.”

Sanchez said that while the SD-WAN market bounced back after a “slightly weaker” fourth quarter, confusion around the SASE and SSE conversation swung the pendulum toward the security side of the convergence conversation. “Perhaps rightfully so, given the security implications of hybrid work and the environment that we live in here in the post-pandemic world,” he added.

Sanchez said that SASE is not just a security conversation and that Enterprise transformation needs to remember networking requirements.

“I always try to educate folks, don't forget the networking. As much as the security side garners a lot of the attention, at least in the context of SASE, it's about the total package,” he said. “Yes, people can start off with either side of that transformation. But ultimately, it's a journey toward this more converged end-state between the networking and the security side.”