SD-WAN & SASE market grew 30%, but what are the challenges behind it?

According to the latest "SASE & SD-WAN & SSE Market Research Report" released by Dell'Oro Group, the SSE (Secure Service Edge) market grew 40% year-on-year to more than $800 million in the first quarter of 2022. SSE is a relatively new market that incorporates cloud-centric security features to facilitate secure access to the Web, cloud services, and private applications.

SSE forms the security portion of SASE. Within SASE, SSE focuses on unifying all security services, including secure web gateways (SWG), cloud access security brokers (CASB), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and firewall as a service (FWaaS). The other half of the SASE platform focuses on the simplification and unification of network services, including software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), WAN optimization, quality of service (QoS), and other methods to improve routing to cloud applications.

"In the age of distributed applications and hybrid work, enterprises are increasingly looking to cloud-delivered security over traditional on-premises solutions," said Mauricio Sanchez, research director for network security, SASE and SD-WAN at Dell'Oro Group.

In addition, the report also mentioned the following points:

• FWaaS and ZTNA revenues increased by more than 100% year-over-year.
• Cumulatively, SWG and CASB revenues grew nearly 30% year-over-year.
• Total SASE network and security revenues approached $1.5 billion, up more than 30% year over year.
• SD-WAN revenue grew more than 20% year over year.
• There are more than 35 vendors in the SASE market, with the top 11 vendors accounting for 80% of market revenue.

However, despite the market growth, the intricate challenges surrounding SD-WAN and SASE remain. MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) interviewed and surveyed 36 experts from 10 service providers and summarized the current problems and challenges in the development of SD-WAN and SASE.

Challenge 1: Lack of clear standardization of managed SD-WAN services

MEF said SD-WAN service providers face challenges with a lack of clear standards and interoperability. Standards organizations such as MEF are working to develop SD-WAN specifications, but service providers have not yet reached a consensus on how to standardize SD-WAN. One vendor's service may not be compatible with another vendor, which poses a challenge to how to integrate services between vendors.

SD-WAN challenges include:

• Multi-vendor SD-WAN complexity. Service providers often use and offer SD-WAN services from different vendors, resulting in interoperability issues, leading to management and operational complexity.
• Security integration. Implementing security in an SD-WAN environment remains difficult because the industry has yet to define standard security terminology and requirements. In addition, enterprises lack network security experts who can migrate customers from traditional security services to SD-WAN security.
• Difficulty in Providing SLAs. The challenges of managing SD-WAN’s overlay and underlay networks make it difficult for service providers to guarantee customers optimal network performance through SLAs.
• Lack of customer awareness. Customers are largely unaware of how SD-WAN service providers operate.

Challenge 2: SASE services are also difficult to define

SASE is a relatively new technology and the challenges it faces are comparable to those of SD-WAN, but more complex because the technology is still in the early stages of development.

SASE challenges include:

• Lack of industry standards. MEF said SASE products lack standardized definitions specifically for products offered by network MSPs. MEF is trying to address this challenge by developing the W117 standard.
• Customer awareness and department integration. There are a limited number of industry standards for SASE, which leads to a lack of understanding among customers about how the service works. In addition, most companies have separate network and security teams. According to MEF, it will take years to integrate network and security departments into a SASE-based team.
• Incomplete products. Currently, most SASE vendors do not provide complete product features, which means that MSPs must integrate potentially incompatible services to provide complete products to enterprise customers.
• Inconsistent security services. Security teams struggle to provide optimal security in complex SASE environments because security requirements are not uniformly defined and are relatively scarce.
• Tool shortage. The SASE market is still new, so it’s difficult for service providers to determine the types of tools, testing, and certifications to offer enterprises.
• Define SLAs. It is difficult for SASE providers to offer customers a greater SLA than SD-WAN service providers.

MEF said that although the SD-WAN and SASE markets are still on an upward trend, the challenges brought by the complexity of these two technologies may hinder their development momentum in the future.