Market SASE
In the market today, a few different manufacturers offer self-proclaimed SASE products. The potential list of services across their portfolios that may be a part of a complete SASE service could be in the dozens, depending on their market approach. Calling a service SASE does not make it so, and as there is no SASE certification for solutions at the time of writing this book, no vendor or MSP is exclusively accurate in their marketing of what is or is not SASE. The standards for SASE have not been published at this time.
Gartner started a fire with that simple blog post in 2019. Overnight, every SD-WAN solution in the market offered a path to SASE. The SASE idea itself multiplied the SD-WAN market's potential revenue of over $11 billion United States Dollars (USD) by 2028. The global secure access service edge (SASE) market size is expected to reach $11.29 billion USD by 2028, registering a CAGR of 36.4%, a ResearchAndMarkets report reveals. The source of this quotation can be found at the following link: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/08/17/sase-market-2028/.
The reality is that an $11 billion-dollar market is only the core SASE product offering for the market. Hardware, software licensing, hosting, maintenance, and support make up the core products, whereas managed services and professional services can multiply the market impact by up to 25 times the core product revenue.
Market Challenge
The market challenge for realizing revenue potential will be primarily impacted negatively by a lack of skilled labor for design, build, and deploy services. This skills gap and the operational expenses preference of most Chief Information Officer/Chief Financial Officer (CIO/CFO) strategies will drive more than 70% of the market to contract SASE as a managed services offering. In the market, there is a trend of up to 78% of SD-WAN contracts leveraging managed services as opposed to utilizing in-house engineering teams. The primary reason for this change is not tied to SASE as CIO and CFO focus has been to rely on technical services as Operating Expense (OPEX) as opposed to Capital Expense (CAPEX). OPEX has been the goal for what is considered by an organization as non-business value cost. Generally, the CIO direction of the largest organizations is to convert operational support staff costs in order to leverage the cost savings on Software Development combined with IT Operations (DevOps) staff costs, which can offer a business Return On Investment (ROI). Support teams are a cost center, whereas the DevOps team can provide the potential to be a profit center to the company.
The complexity of SASE services is driving the need for technology engineering careers to move to a continual learning path. The time has passed where an engineer could rest on traditional education or certification paths. Traditional academic education can provide perspective, historical knowledge, foundational knowledge, and soft skills required for functioning in an organizational environment, whereas industry and manufacturing certifications provide core technical knowledge for functional understanding in a vertical role within an organization. Both educational methods are beneficial for building a foundational understanding of a skill set and both are effective filters when recruiting for a specific role. Unfortunately, neither can move at a market pace, which is today at an average of three DevOps or Software Development combined with Security and IT Operations (DevSecOps) sprint cycles from being out of date and ineffective.
Software development follows a continual improvement path, and so must its practitioners. The goal of the DevOps mentality is to leverage iterative development in a modular fashion as opposed to legacy, ground-up development and Go-To-Market (GTM) practices. DevOps practitioners continually develop, improve, and release. Scrum sprint cycles vary by organization, but an average of 2 weeks can be used as a model to understand the phases of development. New network and security software releases are no longer tied to hardware releases as they can function as a Virtual Machine (VM), Virtual Network (VNet) function, cloud-native function, application, or service independent of a platform. The entire GTM process could be as little as one Scrum sprint cycle or 2 weeks. Network and security practitioners operate on a New -1 ( N-1) basis, N-1+validated, or wait for a triggering event to validate a new software release. The market average for consumption of new software releases is moving to an average of three sub-versions of code, which could average 6 weeks between the last production upgrade of software and the next production upgrade.
The market has been slow to admit that network or security engineering is no longer a discrete skill set from software development. In fact, SASE services will receive major software updates every 2 to 6 weeks, depending on the development cycle or security issues with each independent SASE service within the overall solution. Minor updates may occur in real time. Education for engineering teams must align with software release cycles.
In summary, the market's perception of SASE varies according to the beholder's skill set. As a result of rapid product development, the market for SASE is likely to grow exponentially, creating the issue of rapid evolution that needs to be managed. The next section clarifies the value proposition of a SASE framework for secure communication solutions.