5 SD-WAN and SASE Predictions for 2021

To say 2020 was a year of surprises is a colossal understatement, but in the SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) spaces, that statement couldn’t have be more accurate. To say 2020 was a year of surprises is a colossal understatement, but in the SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) spaces, that statement couldn’t have be more accurate. The challenges of a global pandemic helped to drive adoption of technologies like SD-WAN, particularly in the home, and catapulted SASE from relative obscurity to a hero product. The technologies became critical to enabling countless office workers of all walks of life to transition to remote work. This sudden ramp in addressable market also fueled a vicious cycle of mergers and acquisitions as SD-WAN and security vendors fought to fill the gaps in their respective platforms. So as 2020 comes to a close, here are five predictions of what may come next in the highly competitive SD-WAN and SASE markets. As networking and security becomes more complex and company’s attack surfaces balloon with the migration to the cloud and remote work initiatives, companies like Aryaka and Open Systems argue that the real value add isn’t the technology, it’s the support provided by a vender that is also a managed service provider. In an interview with SDxCentral, Aryaka CEO Matt Carter argued that despite being best known for its global private backbone, the company’s core strength and differentiator remains its position as a managed service provider and its proactive customer service. “Most of the SASE vendors tend to be kind of hands off,” he said. “What we’re finding, what makes us different, better, special is that customers need a lot of hand-holding. Customers don’t like how complex this stuff is. They would prefer to, quite frankly, have someone like us take this on.” While portions of SASE — particularly security functions like cloud-access security broker, secure web gateway, and zero-trust network access — are commonly delivered as a service, most enterprises in North America have traditionally deployed SD-WAN themselves rather than relying on a managed service provider. And it should be noted that even when SD-WAN or SASE are delivered as a service, it doesn’t necessarily mean the customer has the knowledge or the experience to manage it, especially where it concerns security. “Our [development operations model] is tailored to that,” explained Open Systems CEO Jeff Brown. In addition to SD-WAN and now SASE, one of the ways the company has differentiated itself is on managed service front. The company owns and operates its own managed security operations center, and has continued to expand its security portfolio through the acquisition of Sqooba and Born in the Cloud earlier this year. “Our commitment to our customers is we’re going to solve that [security challenge] for you no matter what it takes,” he said. “I think that DNA is hard to buy your way into.” While SASE has become one of the hottest product categories in any one of its adjacent markets — SD-WAN, security, and edge compute — it won’t be replacing SD-WAN or on-premises security, at least not in 2021. SASE is less a new technology than it is a convergence of existing networking and security technologies around a single pass architecture, which enables traffic to be inspected while in transit. In most cases, the SD-WAN appliance is only responsible for providing a secure tunnel from a branch office, retail location, or headquarters to the nearest SASE point of presence (PoP). Here, security functionality, like ZTNA, SWG, and CASB are applied based on the identity, location, posture of user, and the application they are trying to access. So while many SD-WAN and security vendors like Cisco, Versa, and Fortinet are betting customers will begin gravitating towards a full SASE stack, these same vendors plan to continue offering SD-WAN and on-premises security platforms going forward. It’s not a one size fits all kind of thing, Versa CMO Mike Wood told SDxCentral, in an interview this fall. According to Wood, while remote workers had helped to drive adoption of its SASE platform, the company’s SD-WAN offerings remain popular among some customers. Likewise for security, neither Fortinet’s CMO John Maddison or Cisco’s core software and intent-based networking groups Ravi Chandrasekaran believe SASE will replace on-premises security either. Chandrasekaran explained that the enterprise market is at various phases of their WAN transformations, and customers’ needs today may be better addressed by SD-WAN, but in the future may benefit from SASE. As a result, standalone SD-WAN and security appliances won’t be going away anytime soon. Looking ahead to 2021, artificial intelligence (AI) looks like it will play a more significant role in managing network operations and automation. AI operations or AIOps has increasingly become a talking point among SD-WAN vendors and managed service providers alike as a means to cut down on alarm noise and identify and resolve issues more quickly. Last year, Masergy announced its own AIOps platform, which mines data using a combination of anomaly detection and predictive analytics to surface relevant data and recommendations for how customers can improve application performance, predict bandwidth needs, and optimize network throughput. Juniper has also latched onto the AIOps bandwagon with the acquisition of Mist back in 2019. Since the acquisition, the company has worked to extend Mist’s AI capabilities and the Marvis virtual assistant to more of its product line, including the WAN. However, as Raj Gulani, senior director of product manager for Cisco’s enterprise cloud and SD-WAN division points out, most AI applications in SD-WAN today aren’t closed loop and are limited to surfacing issues and can’t proactively address them. Closing the loop will be critical to not only making networks easier to manage, but more fault tolerant as well. “The intent is how do we avoid downtime,” he explained, adding that today’s AIOps platforms can make “finding the needle in the haystack easier” and allow disruptions to be resolved faster, but “the world is moving to ‘I just don’t want the downtime.’” Gulani expects AIOps capabilities within SD-WAN to begin closing the loop sometime in 2021, but “from a mainstream adoption perspective, I think the use cases will drive the timeline.” With the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, how and where people work changed seemingly overnight as kitchen tables and spare bedrooms were hurriedly converted into makeshift offices and classrooms. This rapid transition to remote work created an environment where SASE’s mix of security capabilities, low barrier to entry, and as-a-service model made it an ideal choice for IT teams trying to lock down their security perimeter. To this end, Palo Alto Networks’ CEO Nikesh Arora lauded the success of the company’s Prisma Access SASE platform, which he said achieved a reported $90 million in billings during the the company’s fourth fiscal quarter of 2020. And Palo Alto isn’t alone. Even before the pandemic struck, some vendors, including Versa and Fortinet, had already begun rolling out SD-WAN appliances for remote workers and quickly ramped to meet demand. Wood said the pandemic drove a 100-fold increase in home use of either its SD-WAN or SASE platforms since the beginning of the year. More than 200 Tb/s of traffic is now flowing from home offices through its SASE PoPs, he claimed. Remote work, for better or worse, looks like it’s here to stay. Earlier this month, Google announced it had delayed its return to the office until September 2021. And for many, the shift to remote work could be permanent. A Gartner survey of 229 human resources leaders from April revealed that nearly 50% of organizations had sent at least 80% of their employees home. Of those employees, Global Workplace Analytics now predicts between 25% and 30% will continue to work from home on a permanent basis. SD-WAN and SASE are both expected to see steady growth going into 2021, according to two reports from Dell’Oro Group earlier this year. The firm expects the SASE market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 116%, attaining a market value of $5.1 billion by 2024. According to Mauricio Sanchez, research director at Dell’Oro Group, this growth will be driven, at least in the near-term, by the small to midsized business market. “Those are the guys that are typically the most hamstrung in terms of IT staffing and resources,” he said. “In many cases, SASE is a form of an easy button. … It’s predominantly an ease of use play.” By comparison, Sanchez expects large enterprises to pivot to SASE much more slowly. However, the research firm predicts that fundamental changes in the way companies do business — including a permanent transition to remote work as a norm, as well as the increased use of software-as-a-service applications — will drive adoption of SASE platforms across the board in the long run. On the SD-WAN front, Dell’Oro expects the worldwide sales of SD-WAN technologies will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 24% over the next five years, surpassing $4 billion in 2025. “The pandemic caused some delays in SD-WAN deployments in 2020, but the underlying demand drivers for modernizing WAN infrastructures remains strong,” said Shin Umeda, VP at Dell’Oro Group. “With more clarity on the direction of macroeconomic conditions and the pandemic in 2021, businesses will increasingly execute on their strategic SD-WAN investments, which in turn will drive a market acceleration.” And while slower than SASE, the SD-WAN market is much more mature.