Experts push for SASE standardization

A panel of members of the MEF Technology Advisory Board discussed the evolution of secure access service edge and SD-WAN at the 2022 MEF Members Meeting, in which they stressed the importance of establishing a standard, according to SDxCentral. Every customer I speak to has a different opinion of what SASE is. It started with 30 different things, and now its down to five, said Fortinet Chief Marketing Officer John Maddison. The experts agreed that with the convergence of networking and security becoming a critical issue, the industry needs to set a standard definition for SASE and an official standardizing body to oversee it. Former Nuage Network founder and CEO Sunil Khandekar pointed to the lack of standardization for SD-WAN during its early days as cause for confusion and a race among vendors to introduce their own features to the market. Khandekar says the industry must define some base functionality, some common terms that everybody can understand and use for reference. And then we can start defining and differentiating on top of that, but that has to happen for us to have some ability to influence the way we can, on a sustained basis, have some sort of interoperability in the ecosystems that we participate in, according to Khandekar.