Dec 29, 2023

Single Vendor SASE - what's in it?

Source: Gartner Single Vendor SASE Magic Quadrant

2023 has seen the first edition of what Gartner calls "Single-Vendor SASE" (SVSASE).

That is essentially a combination of SD-WAN and security features (SWG, CASB, NGFW, ZTNA) in a single offering, operated as a service and primarily delivered as a cloud service to customers.

The market driver is what became especially obvious during the pandemic and has only grown since: in many organizations there are now more users, applications and data located outside of an enterprise than inside the network. Attempts to use traditional perimeter-based approaches to secure remote access have resulted in a patchwork of vendors and administration consoles, creating complexity for IT admins and users. That's where SASE comes in.

Some things to note:

this is the first edition of the quadrant for a market that is yet considered new, which explains why only 8 vendors have been included so far.
Only one vendor made it to the leader quadrant - Palo Alto Networks.
Three other vendors have a higher ability to execute. That means vendors with well-established local sales channel, presales support, deal management and pricing structures, reducing the risk of purchasing from the vendor (an important factor in a market where multiple functionalities are converged).
In our Adriatics region, that leaves Fortinet as the most capable due to its established sales channel and portfolio breadth.
Notable exclusions in this year's MQ are Netskope, Checkpoint and Cloudflare, due to either low adoption or incomplete features. As the market grows, Gartner expects more vendors to enter the market in the next years.
interestingly, Gartner expects more vendors to converge SASE with XDR and MDR functionalities. That makes sense, as SASE mostly relies on software endpoint agents, much like XDR technology. With encrypted traffic making network inspection and security enforcement much harder, it's no wonder security will increasingly rest on endpoint inspection. Hence, SASE and XDR convergence makes sense, and vendors with established XDR technology will capitalize the most in the SVSASE market.