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

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— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading