Zscaler, Cisco, Symantec/Broadcom Lead Fast-Growing SSE Market

Zscaler, Cisco and Symantec/Broadcom were the top three vendors in terms of revenue in the security services edge (SSE) market during the first quarter.

That’s according to a new quarterly report by Dell’Oro Group. The SSE market grew 40% year-over-year during the quarter and totaled over $800 million. SSE is a new market. It combines cloud-delivered secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network architecture (ZTNA), and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) technologies.

Unlike secure access service edge (SASE), SSE focuses more on security capabilities and less on network connectivity and infrastructure.

SSE Market Demand

Mauricio Sanchez is research director of network security and SASE-SD-WAN at Dell’Oro Group. He said the need for security in the age of the new “anywhere, anytime, with any device” enterprise environment that the pandemic accelerated is prompting SSE market growth.

Dell’Oro Group’s Mauricio Sanchez

Also driving the SSE market is the “need to improve user experience that 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” degrading app experience, he said.

“In the age of distributed apps and hybrid work, enterprises increasingly prefer cloud-delivered security over traditional on-premises solutions,” Sanchez said.

Benefits Over On-Premises Approaches

As a cloud service, SSE has a number of benefits over classic on-premises approaches, Sanchez said. Those include:

• Security can follow the user wherever they may go. In the age of hybrid work, that can mean a corporate office as much as a local coffee shop.
• Elasticity of a cloud-delivered service (ease, swiftness and scaling of deployments). In today’s world of supply chain crunches, SSEs aren’t impacted.
• At least for SSE platforms that combine multiple SSE functions, a more straightforward management experience. Reducing the need to care and feed disparate solutions.

The SSE market should continue growing due to the combination of the “new normal” of IT enterprise landscape and the aforementioned benefits of SSEs, Sanchez said.

Additional Findings

Additional highlights from the report include:

• Revenue associated with FWaaS and ZTNA cumulatively grew over 100% year over year.
• Revenue associated with SWG and CASB cumulatively grew nearly 30% year over year.
• Total SASE networking and security revenue approached $1.5 billion and experienced over 30% year-over-year growth.
• SD-WAN revenue grew more than 20% year over year even as supply chain headwinds persist.
• Unified SASE, a subset of the total SASE market consisting of solutions that implement SASE networking and security as an integrated platform, achieved triple-digit, year-over-year revenue growth.
• The SASE market has more than 35 vendors, with the top 11 representing 80% of the market by revenue.