Multiple SD-WAN vendors can complicate move to SASE

Enterprises over the past several years have embraced SD-WAN for many reasons, including the flexibility of cloud architecture, enhanced security, centralized management of distributed locations, and improved application availability and performance. In turn, the popularity of SD-WAN has helped propel interest in secure access service edge (SASE), a network architecture that converges connectivity and security services.

But as IT organizations look to transition from SD-WAN to SASE, they’re finding they may need to do some internal housecleaning first. Having multiple SD-WAN vendors can exacerbate management complexity and represent some hurdles when IT organizations move to adopt SASE. If they want a smooth and successful migration, IT organizations should consider consolidating their current SD-WAN providers, improving collaboration across networking and security teams, and evaluating managed service providers (MSP), analysts say.

SD-WAN to SASE progression

The SASE model combines network security functions with WAN capabilities, delivering the security elements in the cloud and using SD-WAN at the edge or in the cloud. Key security functions include secure web gateway (SWG), zero trust network access (ZTNA), firewall as a service (FWaaS), and cloud access security broker (CASB).

Interest in SASE is increasing as IT organizations look to reduce management complexity while securing multiple, disparate end users.

“Enterprise IT generally wants to find efficiencies in managing their environments, and any way that can simplify complex networks is worth evaluating,” says Brandon Butler, research manager for network infrastructure at IDC.

Taking stock of your SD-WAN foundation

One of the motivators to move to SASE is that everything is tightly integrated, says Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates. "As the traffic passes through one point in the SASE cloud, all the security checks are done at one time, rather than separate processes across locations,”

This level of integration is a key reason many IT organizations are considering advancing from an SD-WAN platform to a fully integrated SASE solution, but this transition represents challenges for many. In particular, IT organizations are finding that using multiple SD-WAN vendors can cause issues when trying to migrate to a cloud-based security approach.

“More than 20% of companies we surveyed have multiple SD-WAN vendors. For instance, many organizations will have an SD-WAN vendor in place and then have a need for a new functionality that their existing vendor doesn’t offer, so they get another product,” says McGillicuddy.

“Whether they are doing SASE or not, IT organizations should look for ways to consolidate SD-WAN vendors. SD-WAN projects and environments are more successful when they are provided from a single vendor, and if SASE is a goal, consolidating SD-WAN vendors would help,” EMA’s McGillicuddy says.

If a single SD-WAN vendor isn’t a realistic option for the business, IT organizations should evaluate MSPs to reduce the pain and some of the complexity of managing and securing traffic across multiple vendor SD-WANs. MSPs should be able to offload the management of multiple SD-WANs, monitor the traffic, and gain visibility into application performance across the entire environment.

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