SASE market reaches US$6b, up over a third

Networking and telco market research company Dell’Oro Group has found that the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market topped US$6b in revenue in 2022, showing a 34 per cent growth year on year.

Cisco continued to be the leader of the SASE market, with 17 per cent of revenue share, but Zscaler followed closely behind at 16 per cent, closing in compared to the previous year.

The top overall SASE vendors by revenue represented over 40 per cent of the market and included Cisco, Zscaler and Broadcom/Symantec.

“For the third consecutive year, SASE revenue growth topped 30 per cent as the pandemic-fueled need to modernise the network and security architecture for branch offices and hybrid users continued," Dell’Oro Group SASE and SD-WAN research director of network security Mauricio Sanchez said.

The networking portion of SASE (SD-WAN) saw revenue climb 30 per cent year over year, as the enterprise shift from access routing to SD-WAN solutions increased, and supply chains for hardware largely improved.

The largest three SD-WAN vendors by revenue included Cisco, Fortinet and VMware, who represented nearly half of the market.

The security portion of SASE (SSE – Security Service Edge) experienced 38 per cent growth year over year due to enterprises’ use of cloud-delivered network security to secure cloud-based applications.

SSEs represented nearly 60 per cent of the SASE market by revenue, whereby SD-WAN represented 40 per cent.

Single vendor SASE represented 45 per cent of the overall SASE market, with the top three single vendors being Cisco, Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks.

“Single-vendor SASE solutions grew faster as a reflection of greater enterprise preference for one-stop-shop versus multi-vendor best-of-breed,” Sanchez continued.

The growth rate for unified SASE vendors was far higher than disaggregated SASE revenue and the top three unified SASE vendors were Versa Networks, VMware and Cato Networks.