SASE scoops up $4B in revenue for 2021, Dell'Oro Group reports

SASE had a banner year in 2021, with 37% market growth and $4 billion in revenue, according to a Dell'Oro Group report.

Secure access service edge (SASE) is the convergence of networking and security services. For 2021, the SASE market brought in over $2 billion each in revenue for the networking side, which includes SD-WAN, and the security side, which includes secure web gateway, cloud access security broker (CASB) and zero trust network architecture technologies. In addition, firewall revenue improved in 2021 by increasing 13% and reached a record of over $10 billion.

Dell'Oro Group predicts the SASE market will reach double-digit billion-dollar revenue by 2025.

The SD-WAN market alone grew 35% in 2021, with the top five vendors including Cisco, Fortinet, VMware, Versa and HPE, said Dell'Oro Group in a recent SD-WAN report. The Omdia analyst team forecasts SD-WAN revenue of $5.5 billion for 2025.

"The pandemic made remote work and cloud-based applications necessary, and by doing so, accelerated the obsolescence of the classic hub-and-spoke networking model," said Mauricio Sanchez, research director of network security, SASE and SD-WAN at Dell'Oro Group, in a statement. "Rather than thinking of networking and security as separate problems to solve, they are now being thought of as a continuum and driving together cloud-friendly networking and security technologies into SASE."

The SASE market consists of over 30 vendors, and the top ten carved out 80% of market revenue, said Dell'Oro Group.

Unified SASE, which Dell'Oro defines as a subset of the total SASE market where SASE networking and security is provided as an integrated platform, grew at a rate of almost 50% year-over-year for 2021.

The other main SASE implementation that Dell'Oro Group qualifies is "disaggregated type," which is a multi-vendor or multi-product implementation with less integration than unified type. Dell'Oro didn't provide a growth rate for disaggregated type in 2021. However, the research group predicts the unified type will grow faster than disaggregated, but won't exceed it by total revenue through 2025.

Related posts:

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading