Modern enterprise complexity is challenging cybersecurity programs. One of the biggest reasons is the broadening distribution of applications and employees away from traditional corporate locations, which is fueling complexity and creating networking and security challenges. Secure access service edge (SASE) technology can help address these issues, but adoption paths can widely vary. Indeed, the breadth of SASE and organizational considerations that must be accounted for when converging networking and security lead to a variety of starting points.
In order to investigate how businesses are faring with adoption plans, the use cases they seek to support, and the technologies they prioritize as part of SASE rollouts, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 390 IT and cybersecurity professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, and managing network and/or network security technology products and services, specifically security service edge technology and processes.
This study sought to answer the following questions:
- What are the drivers of interest in SASE? What are the initial use cases for SASE?
- How long do organizations expect it to take to fully adopt a SASE architecture?
- What cybersecurity challenges have been most impactful to organizations? What challenges do organizations face specifically with securing remote user access to corporate applications and resources?
- Do organizations expect their initial approach to SASE to be security- or network-first?
- What plans do organizations have to implement secure service edge technologies? What are the reasons organizations are interested in SSE?
- What challenges have organizations faced, or do they expect to face, when implementing SSE?
- What attributes are most important to organizations when considering an SSE solution?
- How are organizations prioritizing different security tools, such as CASB, ZTNA, and SWG, as they build out their SSE architectures?
- What do organizations believe are the most important attributes of a zero-trust network access solution as part of an SSE architecture?
- What capabilities do organizations find most important in secure web gateway and CASB solutions as part of an SSE architecture?
- How many technology vendors do organizations believe they will work with to support their SASE architecture? What are the drivers for organizations using more than one SASE vendor?
- How do organizations view the current cybersecurity landscape in terms of management difficulty? How does this vary, if at all, according to current SSE adoption status?
- What benefits have organizations recognized to date as a result of implementing SASE?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
