SASE Spotlight: Why Partner With Multiple Security Vendors?

To write our 2023 Network Security Analysis, we asked a mixture of carriers and MSPs, SD-WAN vendors, and pure-play security vendors to tell us about their network security offerings.

The vast majority of our survey respondents were from carriers/MSPs, meaning they often source the security infrastructure and software from pure-play security vendors rather than developing their own security services.

Most providers used more than one security channel partner to offer their services. 

Partnering with several security vendors allows providers to secure a best-in-breed approach for different elements of the framework.

Partnering with several security vendors allows providers to secure a best-in-breed approach for different elements of the framework.

Carriers/MSPs may also use multiple channel partners for the same product to meet different customer needs.

To distill which security providers were most common, in addition to analyzing aggregate totals, we looked at listed security partners by product.

The figure below details security partners across all SASE products. 

SASE Partners (2023)

• Palo Alto was the most common security partner across all SASE products, and nine individual carriers/MSPs listed it as a partner for one or more services.
  
  
• Cisco (including Meraki, Viptela, Umbrella, and Duo) was the next most common security partner with seven carriers/MSPs listing it.
  
  
• There is a long tail of other security partners with some variety of prominence, including Fortinet, Zscaler, Netscout, and VMware.
  
  
• Because we allowed respondents to type in their answers rather than choose from a predetermined list, we received a long list of partners who were only listed once. These were all placed into the “Other” category, which makes up 15 individual partners.

As the network security market continues to evolve, some additional consolidation among security providers seems likely.

Presently, we see a very long tail of channel partners for many SASE and ZTS products, which suggests space for consolidation as certain providers emerge as the best choice for various customer types.

This analysis was pulled from the new SASE module of our Cloud and WAN Research Service.

Learn more about this unique research suite over here.