The second year of Gartner rankings for single-vendor SASE (secure access service edge) featured nine vendors in total.

Cato Networks moved up and Netskope appeared for the first time as Gartner released its latest Magic Quadrant ranking of single-vendor SASE vendors — with the two companies joining Palo Alto Networks in the sought-after “leaders” quadrant ranking.

The recently released 2024 report is the second year that Gartner has issued a Magic Quadrant ranking for providers of single-vendor SASE (secure access service edge). “Single-vendor” SASE offerings must provide both networking capabilities, chiefly SD-WAN, combined on a unified platform with key security capabilities and delivered as a service using a “cloud-centric architecture,” Gartner said.

[Related: SMBs Seeking SASE, And MSPs Are Ready To Deliver]

The cybersecurity capabilities necessary in SASE include secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network access (ZTNA) and network firewalls. When offered separately from SD-WAN, these capabilities are often packaged as a security service edge (SSE) offering.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant ranking is an influential and closely watched indicator of how key players compare in numerous segments of the tech industry.

In August 2023, in what was the first year of Gartner’s single-vendor SASE ranking, only Palo Alto Networks had appeared in the “leaders” quadrant.

For the 2024 single-vendor SASE Magic Quadrant, Cato Networks moved up from its ranking in the “challengers” quadrant a year ago. Cato, according to Gartner analysts, was “an early pioneer that helped drive the market, and its planned innovations are likely to continue to shape the market.”

Netskope, meanwhile, had not qualified for the 2023 Gartner ranking and made its debut in the single-vendor SASE Magic Quadrant as a “leader.” Gartner praised Netskope for bringing a solid track record on customer experience, as well as offering “strong feature breadth and depth for both networking and security.”

SASE Growth

The ranking highlights the rapid ascendancy of Netskope as a full SASE provider, following years spent building a robust SSE platform—which was then combined with SD-WAN capabilities following the company’s 2022 acquisition of Infiot, Netskope’s Robert Arandjelovic told CRN Tuesday. Netskope’s complete, single-vendor SASE platform debuted last fall.

Meanwhile, the company’s launch of a midmarket-focused SASE offering in January also helped to lay the groundwork for the “leaders” ranking, said Arandjelovic, senior director and head of global product and solutions marketing at Netskope.

“There’s no way we could’ve been [a ‘leader’] if we couldn’t speak to that segment of the market,” he said, noting that the Netskope midmarket SASE offering is targeted mainly at delivery through MSP partners.

For the 2024 single-vendor SASE Magic Quadrant ranking, Gartner analysts included a total of nine vendors in the report.

For the “challengers” quadrant in this year’s single-vendor SASE ranking, two vendors, Fortinet and Versa Networks, were selected by Gartner analysts. In the “visionaries” quadrant, Cisco was the sole vendor to appear.

Another three vendors — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cloudflare and Forcepoint — ranked in the “niche players” quadrant for single-vendor SASE, according to the Gartner report. HPE and Cloudflare made their first appearance in the single-vendor SASE Magic Quadrant ranking, having received “honorable mentions” last year.

VMware, now owned by Broadcom, and Juniper Networks had appeared in the 2023 ranking as “niche players” but did not meet the criteria to be included this year, according to Gartner.

Numerous other companies were given “honorable mentions” for their “relevant technology” and investments within the single-vendor SASE space, though the companies did not meet the inclusion criteria for the ranking itself by Gartner’s cutoff date for the report. Among those listed for honorable mentions were Zscaler, Check Point Software Technologies, Sophos, SonicWall and Barracuda.

Looking ahead, Gartner analysts forecast that 65 percent of purchases for SD-WAN will come through a single-vendor SASE offering by 2027, up from 20 percent as of this year.