9 Trends and Predictions for the SASE Market in 2022
Will Versa Networks be acquired in 2022? One partner thinks so.
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Dave Greenfield, director of technology evangelism for Cato Networks, said demand will move from point-solution vendors to providers whose platforms stretch across the globe.
“SASE promises agility, simplicity and speed as a means of enabling the infrastructure to power digital transformation. But those benefits cannot be realized by simply slapping a SASE tag on an aging firewall or SD-WAN appliance. True SASE is a cloud service built on a global, cloud-native platform. In 2022, we’ll see the market consolidate around vendors that built or are focused on building platforms that deliver on the true SASE promise,” Greenfield said.
Douglas Tait, Oracle Communications‘ director of product marketing, pointed to the cloud-based future of SD-WAN.
“SD-WAN will be embedded in cloud-based solutions to ensure high network quality, reliability and security,” they said.
The industry has already witnessed this shift from on-premises. Dell’Oro noted that hardware-based access routers declined in the first six months of of 2021.
Tait said the increased digital transformation of the last two years has led to a “proliferation of IoT devices.”
“However, mission critical IoT will adopt SD-WAN to ensure secure and reliable connections,” Tait said.
Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager of Palo Alto Networks, agreed that work-from-home employees are using more and more types of IoT devices to do their jobs. And many of those devices came from their own residential technology stack.
“Awareness of these devices and the ability to ensure they are secure will become increasingly more important. The home ‘branch’ will become a place of shared cybersecurity responsibility between the enterprise and its employees,” Oswal said.
SD-WAN enjoyed its phase of mass adoption, but SASE has assimilated the technology, according to Joe Fizor, solutions engineer at TBI. Fizor urged channel partners to “ramp up” their security knowledge.
“SD-WAN options will begin to consolidate as SASE takes over. It was always critical to speak to security solutions in conjunction with SD-WAN, but with SASE it’s seamless,” Fizor said.
Jason Ness is CEO of CommandLink. He cautioned partners about using the term “secure access service edge” in front of customers.
But Ness said if partners can learn to properly articulate the value proposition of secure remote access, they stand to profit.
“Customers buy what they understand. Partners sell what they understand. SASE is confusing with too much jargon: SASE/CASB/SWG/ZTNA/NGFW/DLP/UEBA/SDP. Customers pay to solve problems and user security is a problem. The pandemic fueled remote access and businesses scrambled to use what they already had. 2022 should be a good mix of people coming off remote access VPN and IT having time to take on a new project. Partners can help customers by keeping it simple, showing the security problems with their current ‘remote access’ and how the business can secure their remote access (SASE) and improve user performance.”
Versa Networks CEO Kelly Ahuja said the era of cloud-based secure SD-WAN is giving customers on-demand, easy to use offerings.
“When channel clients’ branch and corporate offices connect to multiple clouds, they need cloud-intelligent, dynamic multi-path connectivity and robust security,” Ahuja said. “In 2022, it is critical that channel partners help their clients simplify their broad range of multicloud networking and security functions – that include routing, SD-WAN, carrier-grade NAT, DOS, IP address management, stateful firewall, NGFW, IPS, IDS, antivirus, and malware – in a single view that is interoperable and consistent.”
Speaking of Versa, Matthew Toth offered a bold prediction about the San Jose, California-based firm.
Toth, who leads Michigan-based consultancy C3 Technology Advisors, said Versa will be acquired in 2022.
“They’re a wonderful company with a great product that lacks a large enough distribution network to fully capitalize on what they’ve created,” Toth told Channel Futures.
Oswal pointed to a trend that we’ve witnessed over the last two years: the home office becoming cybercriminals’ favorite attack vector.
“With remote work, cybercriminals will continue to use unprotected or unpatched employees’ home computers as a way to penetrate corporate networks,” Oswal said. “Social engineering to steal credentials and brute-force attacks on corporate services to gain access to weakly protected servers will only increase in this next year.
That prediction comes from Andrew Ossipov, Cisco’s distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for network, workload and cloud security. Ossipov noted that traditional boundaries for both users and applications are blending.
“Enterprises will expect the next-generation SASE solutions to secure inbound connections toward hybrid applications as a natural extension of existing network interconnects and threat controls. Human-readable security policies will normalize and abstract heterogenous endpoint, network and workload enforcement points across privately hosted and cloud-delivered environments. A promising future of unimpeded yet secure end-to-end connectivity necessitates a dramatically simpler user experience in SASE and beyond,” Ossipov said.
That prediction comes from Andrew Ossipov, Cisco’s distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for network, workload and cloud security. Ossipov noted that traditional boundaries for both users and applications are blending.
“Enterprises will expect the next-generation SASE solutions to secure inbound connections toward hybrid applications as a natural extension of existing network interconnects and threat controls. Human-readable security policies will normalize and abstract heterogenous endpoint, network and workload enforcement points across privately hosted and cloud-delivered environments. A promising future of unimpeded yet secure end-to-end connectivity necessitates a dramatically simpler user experience in SASE and beyond,” Ossipov said.
Channel partners will emerge as SASE (secure access service edge) sales experts in 2022.
It feels like it was just yesterday when the VAR Guy declared in April 2015 that SD-WAN was “poised to disrupt the networking market.” Six-and-a-half years later, the next wave of evolution has arrived in the form of SASE.
SASE, of course, had already captured the headlines as early as 2019 (thanks for another acronym, Gartner). The trend added to one we were already seeing in SD-WAN conversations — that security capabilities were helping vendors win deals. As a result, some of the largest cybersecurity vendors, such as Palo Alto Networks, acquired SD-WAN providers in order to build an integrated platform.
“SASE converges networking and security services into one cloud-delivered platform that helps organizations to achieve a zero-trust security posture regardless of location or device,” said Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager of Palo Alto Networks.
If SASE wasn’t sitting center stage by 2020, the pandemic made darn sure. Analysts and vendors had previously talked about networking as a branch office conversation, but the work-from-home movement created an unprecedented number of home offices. Moreover, a formidable number of employees won’t be returning to work if COVID-19 ever subsides.
“The reality of employees working from wherever they’re comfortable and productive will become the new norm in 2022,” Oswal said.
A Versa Networks report found that 64% of businesses have already adopted SASE or will in the upcoming year. Dell’Oro Group concluded that the SASE implementation will double yearly through 2025.
The channel is looking to tap into this growth, but it’s going to take some work. Consider that 65% of consultancies haven’t sold SASE yet, according to Avant. Plenty of partners (and certainly their customers) don’t know how to define SASE.
We asked partners and vendors what trends will prove important in the year to come.
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