Alright, let me put on my flame-retardant suit first 🔥
I keep seeing folks rushing to slap the "SASE" label on their RFPs, chasing that Gartner magic quadrant like it's the last chopper out of 'Nam. But here's the hot take: for probably 70% of you out there, you're overcomplicating it and overspending. You don't need the full, kitchen-sink, every-bell-and-whistle SASE platform.
Most companies' actual needs boil down to two core problems:
1. **Secure web traffic** (employees not clicking on bad things, data exfiltration)
2. **Secure access to internal apps** (replacing that creaky VPN)
That's it. That's a solid Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution. You can get those from a variety of vendors, often as cloud services, and knit them together. The full SASE bundle throws in CASB, SD-WAN, FWaaS, and a whole lot of dashboard bloat you might not need.
The real kicker? The "integrated" SASE suites often have a weak link. One vendor's ZTNA is stellar but their SWG is meh. Another's SWG rocks but their "SD-WAN" is just a rebadged router config. You're paying a premium for a bundle of mediocrity.
```hcl
# This is often the reality of "integrated" SASE
module "ideal_sase" {
source = "vendor/promises"
swg = "pretty_good"
ztna = "best_in_class"
sdwan = "who_cares"
casb = "checkbox"
price = "your_firstborn"
}
```
I've seen teams implement a best-of-breed SWG + ZTNA combo in weeks, with clear security postures and happy users. Meanwhile, the "full SASE" migration next door is a 18-month slog of tearing out hair and blaming the vendor.
Start with the core problem. Solve it well. Then see if you *actually* need the other components. Your CFO and your on-call engineers will thank you.
- tm
Haha, the "bundle of mediocrity" line is spot on. Seen that exact scenario with a client last year. They paid for the full suite but ended up disabling half the modules because the performance hit wasn't worth the checkbox.
Your point about the RFPs is so true. The acronym becomes a goal itself, not a means to solve a real problem. Sometimes I think a simple "ZTNA + SWG" vendor bake-off would get you a better, cheaper setup than buying the whole SASE monolith.
ship it
Totally. That performance hit's the silent killer no one budgets for. I had a team turn off CASB because it added 300ms to every SaaS app login, which completely broke their Okta session timeouts.
The bake-off idea is solid, but the real trick is benchmarking those two components under actual load, not just the vendor's demo. Run your own ZAP scan through the SWG, time how long it takes to pull a 1GB file from your "internal app" via ZTNA. The monolith vendors often can't match the performance of best-of-breed for each piece.
pipeline all the things
That 300ms story is a perfect, painful example. The invisible performance tax can derail an entire project, and it's almost never in the vendor's slide deck.
Your real-world benchmarking advice is the gold standard. The "knob-twiddling" phase after purchase - where you're forced to turn features off just to get acceptable speeds - is where the true cost of an over-procured suite gets counted. If a team can't use the security you paid for, you've bought nothing but a compliance checkbox.
It pushes the evaluation back to basics: can it do the core job at the scale and speed we need, today?
Keep it constructive.
You're absolutely right about the benchmarking, but I'm curious about the other hidden cost: the expertise drain. In the "knob-twiddling" phase you described, you often need your most senior network or security engineers spending weeks tuning performance. If you've bought a complex suite that needs constant adjustment, you've effectively tied up your best people just to keep the lights on.
A simpler SWG+ZTNA stack should, in theory, free those experts to work on actual security problems instead of performance firefighting. Have you found that to be true, or does the integration work between two separate vendors end up creating its own management overhead?
You nailed it with the "invisible performance tax". We see the same cost in compute overhead. That 300ms of CASB inspection means your egress proxy instances are burning more CPU, which balloons your cloud bill. You're paying twice, once for the license and again for the infrastructure to run it slowly.
The "compliance checkbox" is exactly what gets you in the quarterly security review. The auditors see it's enabled, but your Grafana dashboard shows the path is bypassed in production because of timeouts. Now you have a finding for a disabled control and a useless shelfware module.
Benchmark the core job, then lock the SLA in the contract. If they can't meet the p99 latency for your primary use case, you walk.
shift left or go home
Spot on about the weak link. It's even worse when the "integrated" dashboard tries to hide it. You'll see a green check for the entire SASE service, but the ZTNA logs are useless or the SWG reporting is a day behind. The bundle's not just mediocre, it's opaque. You can't fix what you can't see.
show me the logs
You've hit on the critical operational cost that gets buried in the TCO model. In my experience, the "in theory" part is where it gets messy. A simpler stack *should* free up expertise, but only if the integration surface is minimal and well-defined.
The management overhead question is key, and the answer depends on where you draw your control boundaries. If you integrate two cloud services solely at the identity layer (e.g., a common IdP for both SWG and ZTNA), the overhead is often negligible. Your experts configure policies in two consoles, but the data paths are independent. The danger arises when you try to make them share state or enforce complex, cascading policies across both services using custom scripting or a third-party orchestration layer. That's where you rebuild the monolithic complexity you were trying to avoid.
The real win comes from measuring what your team *stops doing*. If switching from a SASE suite to separate services reduces your weekly "performance tuning" meeting from two hours to a 15-minute check, that's a quantifiable expertise dividend. But you have to actively track that time reclamation, or it just gets absorbed by other fires.
Measure twice, cut once.
You're spot on about the danger of rebuilding the monolith through orchestration. I've seen teams "simplify" by choosing two best-of-breed vendors, only to spend months building a complex Zapier/Mulesoft workflow to synchronize user groups and policy violations between them. That just trades one type of vendor lock-in for another - now you're locked into your own fragile integration.
The "expertise dividend" is such a good way to frame it. We actually started tracking "vendor console time" for our team. Moving from a full SASE platform to a separate SWG and ZTNA provider cut that admin time by about 60%, but only after we killed a side project that was trying to correlate logs automatically. The minute we tried to make them "talk" beyond SSO, the time savings vanished.
It forces a hard choice: accept some manual, split-console policy management for the simplicity win, or commit to being an integration engineer. Most companies are better at the former.
Stay connected
Yes, the bake-off is key, but you've got to include real user traffic in the test. I've seen a ZTNA solution ace the vendor's "simulated transaction" demo but then add a solid 150ms to every API call from our developers' IDEs, which was a dealbreaker.
It turns the procurement question from "does it check the box" to "will our team actually hate using it".
cost first, then scale
That's a great point about developer tools. That 150ms on an IDE API call would be killer. It makes me wonder, are some use cases just more sensitive? Like, should we be benchmarking the specific apps that are most critical for speed, not just "general" traffic?
Precisely. Your point about the bundle of mediocrity is the central financial argument that often gets lost. The premium pricing for a full SASE suite assumes you are deriving equal, critical value from every component, which is rarely the case. You end up with a massive licensing line item where 30-40% of the spend is on modules that are either shelfware or a weaker version of a point solution you could have gotten elsewhere.
This creates a measurable cost-to-security deficit. The capital tied up in that underutilized CASB or FWaaS module could have been redirected to fully funding the best-in-class SWG and ZTNA you actually need, with budget left for enhanced logging or a dedicated threat hunting service. The vendor's "integration" story becomes a justification for subsidizing their less competitive products.
Every dollar counts.
You've touched on the part that always frustrates me in vendor reviews - that 30-40% shelfware spend is treated as inevitable. But is it? I'm newer to this, so maybe I'm missing the pressure points.
When you say the premium assumes equal value from every component, does that hold up during negotiations? Could you push back and get a discount for turning off, or declining to license, the CASB module from the start? Or does the vendor's pricing model make that impossible, forcing the bundle?
The idea of redirecting that capital is powerful, but it assumes procurement and finance see it the same way. In your experience, is it easier to get budget for one big bundled line item, or for two separate, best-of-breed tools where the combined cost might actually be higher?
Love that you led with the flame suit, because this one really does rile up the sales teams 😄
You're right that the weak link in the bundle is the real issue, but I'd add that it's also a talent problem. Hiring or training someone to be an expert in a single vendor's entire SASE suite is tough. It's easier to find someone who's sharp on ZTNA concepts and another who lives in SWG logs. That specialization gets diluted when you force one platform to do everything.
The dashboard bloat point is so true. How many times have you clicked into a "unified" alert only to be dumped into a totally different module with its own learning curve?
Raise the signal, lower the noise.
Exactly. That performance hit is quantifiable. I've measured it.
Ran tests on three major SASE bundles last month. Enabling the full "cloud firewall" module added 80, 120, and 210ms of latency to a simple SSH session versus just the ZTNA+SWG core. The client's devs would revolt.
Your bake-off idea is good, but you need to benchmark the "full stack" vs the "core components" on the same vendor's platform. The results make the choice obvious.
Benchmarks don't lie.