Despite the hype, pandemic-driven remote work has not led to wholesale Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and SDP adoption. Only 12% worldwide currently have a comprehensive SASE architecture, according to a new study by NetMotio, a provider of security solutions for the world’s growing mobile and remote workforce.
Survey finds that enterprise VPNs remain the most widely trusted technology to serve distributed workforces.
As the unexpected growth of remote working greatly accelerated conversations around secure remote access solutions, NetMotion surveyed 750 IT leaders, including CIOs, CTOs, IT and network directors, as well as security analysts across legal, finance, public safety, transportation, healthcare and government sectors in Australia, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The goal was to quantify and qualify the hype around SASE while ascertaining the popularity of various network and security solutions deployed by organizations around the world.
The survey also found that two-thirds (67%) of respondents report confidence in their understanding of the comprehensive SASE framework. However, one quarter of organizations (26%) do not embrace the SASE philosophy at all (nor do they have immediate plans to), while just over one-third (35%) currently embrace it in less than half of their technology stack.
“While SASE is likely to represent the future of network availability, optimization and cybersecurity, our survey revealed that the perception of accelerated adoption is much greater than the current reality, which is that the vast majority of enterprises are not yet close to fully embracing this framework,” said Christopher Kenessey, CEO and President of NetMotion. “Our survey makes it clear that we’re only at the very beginning of the SASE evolution, and that many organizations don’t yet fully appreciate the benefits of going all in on this approach.”
Other key survey findings include:
• Only 67% of respondents in the United States can confidently explain the principles of SASE, compared to 81% in the United Kingdom and 78% in Australia
• The utilities and energy sectors reported the highest share of complete SASE adoption (17%), with legal (14%), finance (12%) and healthcare (11%) following closely behind
• IT teams are taking the lead in SASE implementation (52%), while security teams (21%) and network teams (18%) are also responsible at some organizations
• VPN is the most widely deployed SASE solution (54%), followed by WAN optimization (49%), cloud secure web gateways (46%), firewall-as-a-service (39%) and SD-WAN (29%)
• Despite their hype over the last two years, ZTNA/SDP and edge content filtering are the least widely deployed SASE solutions (15%), although filtering content at the edge is most prevalent in the US (23%), perhaps driven by the need to ensure compliance and security amidst the growth in remote working
• Only 56% of organizations have begun to adopt a zero-trust posture while 24% do not plan to, suggesting that IT leaders either don’t understand zero trust as well as they claim to, or that they are overestimating their own capabilities