New data from Dell’Oro Group shows Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) networking and security revenue grew 30% year on year in Q1 2022, reaching nearly $1.5 billion. Mauricio Sanchez, the firm’s research director for Network Security, SASE and SD-WAN, told Fierce he expects strong growth to continue throughout 2022.
According to Dell’Oro, the $1.5 billion figure included an $800 million contribution from Security Services Edge (SSE) offerings. The firm defines SSE as encompassing the security elements of SASE, including cloud-delivered Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Zero Trust Network Architecture (ZTNA) and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) technologies. The SSE figure was up 40% year on year. The remaining revenue came from SASE networking, i.e. SD-WAN.
Though he didn’t provide breakout figures, Sanchez told Fierce SWG accounted for the largest portion of SSE revenue, followed by CASB, ZTNA and FWaaS. He noted the latter two categories are the newest and said the revenue mix could very well change if ZTNA and FWaaS continue to grow at their current rate. If that happens, “then one of them may move into the second spot,” he said.
Looking at the next four quarters, Sanchez said he’s “expecting some broad-based growth modulation over the next year due to ongoing deterioration of macro-economic conditions." Still, he tipped SASE to grow "north of 20% year-over-year.”
Among other SASE growth drivers, he highlighted the need for security in the new “anywhere, anytime, with any device” enterprise environment that rose out of the pandemic. Sanchez also pointed to the need to improve user experiences which suffered “due to classical hub-and-spoke architecture–where data is backhauled back to corporate center before forwarding to Internet–introducing latency, jitter and throughput issues.”
While the report noted there are more than 35 vendors in the SASE market (which includes both networking and security), Sanchez said the top three for the quarter were Cisco, Zscaler and Symantec.