The secure access service edge (SASE) framework continued to make waves across the networking and security markets in 2022, with the third quarter of the year marking the seventh quarter in a row SASE revenue growth exceeded 25%, Dell’Oro Group reported.

Research Director Mauricio Sanchez told SDxCentral he expects “SASE will continue to see revenue expansion in 2023” driven by the same factors as this year – including hybrid work and digital transformation efforts that continue to prevail in modern enterprises, and cloud-based network security that has emerged as a superior alternative to legacy VPN architectures.

But before jumping into the new year, here are the top 10 SASE stories from SDxCentral in 2022:

SSE and SASE posted robust growth during the first quarter of this year, highlighting increased Enterprise adoption of cloud-delivered security services, according to a 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's Sanchez said the strong growth is a testament to more enterprises preferring cloud-delivered security over traditional on-premises solutions. Read more.

Telefónica tapped cloud security vendor Zscaler to develop a new managed SSE platform in a bid to address changing workforce dynamics and cloud consumption. The announcement illustrated a growing trend around the Gartner-coined product category, in which cloud security and SASE vendors alike announce “new” products and services around the buzzword.

But for the most part, these SSE products aren’t so much new as they’re rebranded and repackaged SASE services that’ve been stripped of their SD-WAN capabilities, if they ever had them in the first place. Zscaler’s SSE is built around the same Zscaler Internet Access and Zscaler Private Access products that, just a few months ago, it was calling SASE. Read more.

AT&T has been striving to build security capabilities including those that SASE architecture can offer into its massive programmable, software-defined networking (SDN) to cover all flows ubiquitously, Chief Security Officer Bill O’Hern and CTO Jeremy Legg told a group of trade media journalists at its headquarters in Dallas.

Legg likened the strategy to the secured fence all around the parking lot outside of a football field to “keep the bad guy out.” O’Hern added that the SDN makes “delivering customers clean pipes possible.” Read more.

Palo Alto Networks reported strong fourth-quarter earnings for the fiscal year 2022, despite macroeconomic and supply chain impacts. Executives touted the vendor’s competitive advantage in SASE and multicloud security strategy as major growth drivers.

The company saw “significant momentum” in its customer traction on SASE for the fiscal year, Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich said during the earnings call. Read more.

Netskope acquired cloud networking vendor Infiot to get one step closer to delivering a fully integrated, single-vendor SASE platform.

The integration of Infiot’s technology provides the new Netskope Borderless WAN with uniform security and quality of experience (QoE) policies to a range of hybrid work needs, “from employees at home or on-the-go, to branch offices, ad-hoc point-of-sale systems, and multicloud environments,” Netskope noted in a statement.

“We’re very cognizant that the goal at Netskope is to converge security and networking,” Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri told SDxCentral in an interview. Beri said the Infiot acquisition brings to Netskope the “foundational technology and team for that solution.” Read more.

Gartner’s latest SD-WAN Magic Quadrant report forecasts continued market growth and increased convergence of networking and network security to meet evolving demand.

The firm predicts end-user SD-WAN spending will grow at a 14% Compound Annual Growth Rate from 2020 through 2026. Gartner Senior Director Analyst Jonathan Forest said that growth reflects increased user demand for converged services.

“We all know about SASE, the converging of SD-WAN and [SSE], making SASE,” Forest told SDxCentral. “When you see the convergence of these adjacent markets, you can envision those growth opportunities.” Read more.

Palo Alto Networks called on the cybersecurity industry to make the shift to next-generation zero-trust network access (ZTNA) — which the vendor calls ZTNA 2.0, claiming that traditional ZTNA products “have proven more dangerous than helpful” in today’s hybrid work and cloud migration world.

Two years ago, in the thick of the pandemic, most companies had to quickly shift to a remote work model. “They were either scaling up their home access solutions [such as] VPNs, etc., or they were migrating to what was available — often, it was a ZTNA 1.0 solution,” Kumar Ramachandran, SVP of product and GTM at Palo Alto Networks, told SDxCentral. Read more. 

Juniper Networks added CASB and data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities to its SSE portfolio. The vendor claims it now provides a full-stack SASE solution offering stepwise transition and security consistency.

“We’re the industry’s first and only full-stack SASE solution that allows the customer to leverage what they have today, extending that to the cloud and giving them more visibility and insight to whatever it is they need to secure,” Samantha Madrid, Group VP of security business and strategy at Juniper Networks, told SDxCentral in an interview during the RSA Conference. Read more.

Fortinet drew a line in the sand for how it believes SASE will be delivered after announcing a strategic partnership with Orange Business Services. The collaboration will see Orange deploy Fortinet’s full security and networking stack across its global infrastructure and network backbone.

The approach encapsulates a growing divide between SASE vendors, which have largely relied on the major cloud and colocation providers for networking and hosting.

“The problem I found in the last five or six years of speaking with service providers and telcos is they were siloed. They had this networking team, and they had this security team, and they would come together, but it was usually after the services were built, and that created an opportunity for what I call independent SASE vendors,” Fortinet CMO John Maddison told SDxCentral. “It opened the door because telcos couldn’t really build a competitive product.” Read more. 

Cisco is expanding its SASE ecosystem to offer integration with SSE providers Cloudflare and Netskope.

Gartner recognized Cisco as one of the nine vendors that can offer a single-vendor (or unified) SASE solution – network edge capabilities like SD-WAN and a cloud-delivered SSE security suite that includes secure web access gateway (SWG), CASB, ZTNA, and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS).

However, Gartner said a two-vendor SASE approach is another viable option for some enterprises. The Cisco integration with Cloudflare and Netskope SSE solutions aims to simplify a two-vendor SASE architecture for organizations that would like to use Cisco’s SD-WAN but a different SSE vendor. Read more.