Single-vendor SASE – a reality check

It is still early on in the single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) market game, yet SASE is maturing rapidly to meet a growing interest among clients amid hyper-transitions to hybrid work. 

Single-vendor SASE delivers duo network and security capabilities to users, devices and locations to resources in the cloud but implementation is a while away according to John Isch, director, Digital and Communication Services, Americas, Orange Business, who spoke on the SASE panel during Silverlinings' Cloud Cover event on March 15 (available on demand).

When having a conversation with enterprise customers, it's important to ask, "Who are your vendors today, and we can asses a customer's environment pretty quickly," said Isch. "And then ask, 'How are we going to improve your environment today by moving to single source?' and that's a big job to convince a customer to go down that road."

Instead, because larger volumes of users, devices, etc. are being used outside an enterprise versus inside — a hat tip to work-from-anywhere initiatives —  organizations should hone-in on developing a SASE strategy, according to Gartner.

By 2025 alone, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access using a SASE/security services edge architecture, up from 20% in 2021.

Adoption by numbers 

There are currently three main SASE adoption options: single-vendor offerings, explicit pairing of two vendors (network services and security services) and managed SASE. 

While multiple providers have a single-vendor SASE offering today, only a handful offer the necessary breadth and depth of functionality across all components, a single management plane, and unified data model and data lake, according to Gartner. In 2022, only 10% of SASE deployments were based on a single-vendor SASE offering.

However, Gartner expects this figure to jump to around 33% by 2025.

The SASE approach

The analyst firm suggests the following for organizations looking to adopt SASE offerings:

Establish a strategy: It is crucial to engage your security organization and establish a functional SASE strategy team. This will not only be more efficient when implementing SASE, but also increase the chances of a successful implementation.

Evaluate offerings: Organizations should evaluate single-vendor offerings, plus two partnered vendors. By 2025 alone, 65% of enterprises will have consolidated individual SASE components into one or two explicitly partnered SASE vendors, up from 15% in 2021, according to Gartner. 

Assess your organization’s needs: SASE teams should rank request for information (RFI) and request for proposal (RFP) requirements based on level of importance — what’s mandatory versus optional — to understand any trade-offs with single-vendor SASE offerings. 

Test functionality: Organizations should run a test pilot with real-world users and locations to ensure functionality and performance before committing to a single-vendor SASE offering, suggests Gartner. Because of the market’s immaturity, a current SASE offering may not be best of breed in all areas. 

A single-vendor waiting game

Hybrid work initiatives have created a need for cloud-centric SASE capabilities to connect users, devices and locations everywhere to an enterprise’s digital resources.

Gartner emphasizes keeping eye on single-vendor SASE offerings that provide single-pass scanning, single unified console and data lake coverage to improve user experience and staff efficiency.


Brush up on your SASE skills today. Watch the on-demand Cloud Cover event here.