Secure SD-WAN delivers the reliability, performance, and unified control every SASE strategy needs to be successful
As organizations invest in secure access service edge (SASE) solutions, they’re evaluating both security and networking functions. The right SD-WAN solution plays a critical role in enabling a truly effective SASE solution. A unified SASE architecture built on secure SD-WAN provides consistent security, optimized connectivity, and unified management for users and applications across hybrid and cloud environments.
Country Manager, India & SAARC
Fortinet
Two major factors are driving most organizations toward SASE adoption. The first is the rise of the hybrid workforce, now a standard model for many industries. The second is the shift to digital-first strategies. Most organizations have adopted or plan to adopt digital-first approaches, with their workloads increasingly distributed across public and multi-cloud environments. SASE’s goal is to support dynamic, secure access needs of today’s organization. SASE plays a critical role in ensuring that security can be delivered anywhere, including at the WAN edge, cloud edge, data center edge and endpoint devices used by today’s hybrid workforce.
Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 60% of new SD-WAN purchases globally (including India) will be part of a single-vendor SASE offering, a massive jump from 15% in 2022. By 2027, Gartner projects that 47% of enterprises will have deployed SASE, as CISOs shift away from fragmented legacy architectures toward unified platforms to manage AI-related data risks. According to Coherent Market Insights the India SASE market is expected to reach 2,136.6 Million USD by 2032 exhibiting an annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.1%.
Organizations typically approach their SASE journey in one of two ways: either by connecting SD-WAN to secure service edge (SSE) or by integrating SSE with SD-WAN. In either case, success depends on unifying networking and security capabilities, maintaining consistent policy enforcement for both on-premises and remote users, and using agentic AI to strengthen defenses and simplify operations.
Let’s look at the key SD-WAN functionalities that make it a cornerstone of an effective SASE deployment.
Safeguarding Traffic Flow Everywhere with Converged Security and SD-WAN
For years, SD-WAN has been transforming networking by enabling organizations to transition away from costly MPLS circuits while maintaining reliable broadband performance. It has also introduced intelligent traffic steering and centralized management to enhance user experience and simplify operations. Today, its most critical evolution is the integration of advanced security into a single platform, powered by a single operating system and unified management. This integration delivers several key advantages when expanding to SASE: secure local internet breakout without backhauling to the DC, SSE, or service chaining to another security device.
Reduce latency and the number of hops to the end destination. This enables direct connectivity to the intended application, thereby enhancing the user experience.Secure site-to-site communication without backhauling to an SSE POP to optimize performance.
Reduce the attack surface by providing advanced security for east-west traffic.
As organizations adopt universal zero-trust network access (ZTNA) to ensure granular, secure access, regardless of user or application location, incorporating a ZTNA application gateway into their SD-WAN solution can easily enforce ZTNA tags and policies.
Extending Security into Application Performance
While integrated security and ZTNA enforcement ensure that users and applications connect safely, performance and reliability are equally critical. Once traffic is secure, SD-WAN’s intelligence in steering applications across networks becomes the next key factor in delivering a seamless experience, especially as organizations balance on-premises, cloud, and SaaS workloads.
Smarter application steering for unmatched performance and productivity
As organizations distribute applications across data centers, clouds, and SaaS environments, SD-WAN must intelligently steer traffic based on each request. With application-aware routing for thousands of applications and integrated security, secure SD-WAN can direct traffic, such as SaaS connections, without requiring an SSE POP up front. This reduces the number of hops and lowers overall latency.
Another critical aspect of intelligent and resilient application steering is optimizing traffic from SSE POPs to applications. This is especially important for remote users accessing private apps, helping ensure both performance and resiliency.
AI-enhanced SD-WAN built for the modern SASE architecture
Accelerating troubleshooting, configuration, and policy enforcement while improving end-to-end visibility from branch to application through digital experience monitoring (DEM) is essential in today’s distributed environments. Predictive anomaly detection powered by AI-driven operations (agentic AI) further helps maximize uptime and performance.
Unified management simplifies operations and ensures consistent policy enforcement
As organizations expand to SASE, key elements of SD-WAN include its ability to integrate with SSE and simplify management, enabling consistent policy enforcement across the hybrid workforce. Another advantage of unified management is the speed and efficiency it allows for connectivity and cloud security services.
Purpose-built ASIC engineered for performance accelerates networking and security functions
One of the key SASE use cases is secure branch network modernization. Many organizations begin their SASE journey by modernizing branch networks with secure SD-WAN. With built-in ZTNA and cloud access security broker (CASB) capabilities, secure SD-WAN enables SASE functions locally, closer to the edge, which is essential for deployments where latency and east-west traffic protection are critical. To maintain high performance while delivering these capabilities, a purpose-built ASIC with hardware acceleration is crucial for offloading and accelerating both networking and security functions.
Building and deploying SASE on a Secure SD-WAN Foundation
Before deploying any technology, you must identify the core problems SASE needs to solve for your organization. The most common drivers include:
- Securing hybrid workforces with consistent access policies
- Improving application performance for remote and branch users
- Reducing complexity resulting from managing multiple point solutions
- Meeting compliance requirements across geographies and industries
Clarifying these goals upfront will guide both architectural decisions and deployment sequencing, whether you’re rearchitecting your WAN, consolidating cloud security tools, or both.At its core, SASE means unifying SD-WAN, secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) and unifying them natively not just bundling them under one brand.
In today’s perimeter less environment, identity is the new security anchor. SASE architectures must support dynamic access controls that evaluate not just who the user is but also the context of the request—device posture, location, time of access, and behavioural risk indicators. Next not every organization is ready to go all-in on a cloud-native architecture. So, a strong SASE strategy should support both fully cloud-delivered and hybrid models, allowing you to align deployment with existing infrastructure, geographic constraints, or compliance requirements.Finally a truly unified SASE architecture doesn’t just consolidate tools; it simplifies how they’re managed.
Building tomorrow’s SASE architecture on a secure SD-WAN foundation delivers measurable benefits. Centralized management and self-healing capabilities reduce downtime, while intelligent traffic steering and purpose-built ASIC acceleration improve application performance, and simplified operations help lower the total cost of ownership.
Authored by Vivek Srivastava, Country Manager, India & SAARC at Fortinet
