Managing Vendor Complexity in SASE Adoption

As organisations move toward Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), the goal is often to simplify — to consolidate security and networking capabilities into a unified, cloud-native model that’s easier to manage, scale, and secure.

Yet ironically, many find that the early stages of SASE adoption introduce new complexity, particularly in the form of vendor sprawl.

With networking and security traditionally managed in separate silos — and a market crowded with feature-rich but overlapping solutions — leaders often face a maze of options, partners, contracts, and integration points.

This blog explores how vendor complexity arises in SASE, the risks it poses to your business goals, and how leaders can manage it strategically to drive value and control.

Where Vendor Complexity Comes From

Vendor complexity in SASE isn’t just a procurement problem — it’s a structural outcome of how organisations have evolved.

Common sources of complexity include:

  • Separate providers for networking (e.g. WAN, SD-WAN) and security (e.g. SWG, CASB, firewalls)
  • Niche tools acquired for specific needs like threat detection, remote access, or DLP
  • Different lifecycles for tools procured by different teams
  • Lack of standardisation across business units, regions, or use cases
  • Hasty cloud migrations, leading to bolt-on solutions without long-term strategy

In some cases, organisations trying to “build their own SASE” find themselves managing half a dozen vendors — each with its own dashboards, policies, support models, and upgrade paths.

The Risks of Vendor Sprawl

While SASE is meant to unify, vendor sprawl can fragment your architecture — and your operations. The impact is felt in several areas:

1. Operational Overhead

Managing multiple consoles, contracts, and support channels strains internal teams. Policy changes require duplication. Incident response is slower due to poor visibility and inconsistent telemetry.

2. Inconsistent User Experience

Different tools applying different policies can create confusion, especially for roaming users or hybrid workers. Latency, performance issues, or failed access attempts can degrade productivity.

3. Increased Risk Exposure

Gaps and overlaps in policies can lead to inconsistent enforcement — a major problem in Zero Trust environments. It also increases the likelihood of misconfigurations or blind spots.

4. Poor ROI and TCO Clarity

Multiple vendors with overlapping capabilities can lead to overspending, underuse of features, and difficulty calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) or value realisation.

5. Slower Strategic Execution

Every new project or region rollout requires negotiation across multiple vendors, slowing down innovation and responsiveness to business needs.

The Strategic Role of Vendor Consolidation

Leaders aiming to simplify through SASE must take a strategic approach to vendor management — one that aligns technology architecture with commercial and operational realities.

This doesn’t mean choosing a single vendor for everything — that’s rarely feasible, and often not desirable. Instead, the goal should be intentional consolidation around interoperable, scalable platforms that reduce complexity and support key outcomes.

Five Principles for Managing SASE Vendor Complexity

1. Start with a Clear Capability Map

Before choosing vendors, define the functional outcomes you need from a SASE architecture. Typical capability domains include:

  • Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN)
  • Secure Web Gateway (SWG)
  • Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
  • Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)
  • Firewall as a Service (FWaaS)
  • Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
  • Centralised policy management and visibility

This map helps you identify overlaps, gaps, and opportunities to consolidate.

Leadership tip: Engage both networking and security stakeholders in this mapping — don’t assume one team has the full picture.

2. Assess Vendor Integration Maturity

One of the key value drivers of SASE is policy consistency across components. This is hard to achieve if your tools don’t speak to each other.

When assessing vendors, look for:

  • Unified management consoles
  • Shared policy engines
  • Native integration (not just API bolt-ons)
  • Support for common identity providers and telemetry standards

Leadership tip: Ask not just “Does it integrate?” but “How tightly and how natively?”

3. Rationalise Procurement and Contracts

Use contract renewals, refresh cycles, and project milestones to rationalise vendors and reduce duplication. For example:

  • Replace separate VPN and ZTNA tools with a unified remote access solution
  • Eliminate overlapping SWG and CASB tools with broader coverage from fewer platforms
  • Align contracts across business units to gain pricing leverage and consistency

Leadership tip: Work closely with procurement to bundle purchases and negotiate enterprise-wide terms where appropriate.

4. Balance Best-of-Breed with Operational Simplicity

There’s often a temptation to choose “the best” tool in every category. But managing a patchwork of top performers is not always better than running a well-integrated, slightly less specialised platform.

SASE success is often about trade-offs — between features and manageability, between niche optimisation and overall resilience.

Leadership tip: Frame decisions in terms of business outcomes and total operational impact, not just features or benchmarks.

5. Establish Central Governance Over SASE Architecture

As with cloud governance, SASE needs a central governance model that spans:

  • Vendor selection and approval
  • Policy architecture and enforcement
  • Change control and lifecycle management
  • Security and compliance oversight

Without governance, local teams or business units may continue to procure point solutions that undermine consolidation efforts.

Leadership tip: Use a cross-functional steering group to ensure alignment and reduce shadow IT risks.

What Good Looks Like: Signs of a Simplified SASE Environment

  • Fewer vendor relationships, each aligned to clear domains
  • Single-pane visibility across users, apps, and traffic
  • Consistent policy enforcement, regardless of location or device
  • Faster time to deploy new services or respond to incidents
  • Clear ownership of integration points and vendor performance

Conclusion: Complexity is a Leadership Challenge

Vendor complexity isn’t just a technology headache — it’s a leadership challenge. The decisions made at the executive level about governance, procurement, and architectural direction have a lasting impact on how agile, secure, and scalable your SASE deployment will be.

By taking control of vendor strategy early — and aligning it to business outcomes, not just technical preference — leaders can avoid the pitfalls of sprawl and steer their organisations toward a simpler, more powerful future.

If your SASE initiative feels more complex than expected, pause and assess: are your vendors working together — or just coexisting? The answer might reveal your next strategic move.