The market for single-vendor SASE offerings is dynamic, immature and rapidly changing. When selecting SASE offerings, infrastructure and operations leaders should use this research to help determine the alternatives that best align with their requirements.
Key Findings
- Most vendors in this research integrate multiple products/consoles to deliver their offerings, although three vendors (Palo Alto, Cato and Versa) provide a single, unified product.
- Vendor rankings across the use cases vary substantially. For example, there is a separate vendor at the top and bottom of each use case.
- Across all offerings, most vendors provide strong branch networking and branch network security capabilities. However, the level of advanced security features across all offerings is only mediocre for most enterprises.
- There is a wide range of variation among vendor offerings in several areas, including points of presence, unified experience and SaaS control/visibility.
Recommendations
Infrastructure and operations leaders responsible for I&O platforms should:
- Run functional pilots or proofs of concept with real-world users and locations, before selecting a single-vendor SASE offering, to ensure that both networking and security functionality and performance meet their specific requirements.
- Prefer single-vendor SASE offerings that use a single management plane and a unified security plane, as well as support single-pass decryption and inspection for malware and sensitive data.
- Ignore vendor’s published POP counts when selecting a vendor. Instead, focus only on the vendors’ POPs that provide a full-suite of SASE functionality that is physically local, and is within 100 km of most of your users/branches.
- Include single-vendor SASE offerings on shortlists, when planning strategic investments in a SD-WAN, a firewall, zero trust network access, a secure web gateway or a cloud access security broker.
- Use a team that includes senior networking and security personnel to rank requirements based on what is mandatory versus preferred or optional when selecting a SASE product.
