By Graeme Scott, VP Advanced Networking & Mobility
Let’s face it—networking has grown up fast. Just a few years ago, we were installing MPLS circuits and site-to-site VPNs. Today, customers are asking for seamless cloud access, Zero Trust, and AI-ready connectivity… all while keeping costs down. It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the days when “network edge” meant “the router in the broom closet.”
But beneath the alphabet soup lies a complex story about how SD-WAN matured into SASE, driven by a variety of business factors such as distributed work, cloud dependency, AI workloads, and an ever-expanding perimeter that refuses to stay put. Evolution never stops. In this case, it’s moving at breakneck speed.
When SD-WAN Changed the Game
When SD-WAN first entered the scene around 2012, it wasn’t just another acronym—it was a revolution. Enterprises drowning in MPLS costs suddenly had an elegant way to bond multiple connections, prioritize critical applications, and manage everything centrally.
A mid-sized logistics firm, for example, could replace expensive private circuits across 50 distribution centers with broadband and LTE backup—achieving 35% lower costs and near-zero downtime during circuit failures. For a few years, that was digital transformation.
Then came 2020, and suddenly, everyone went home. Overnight, offices emptied, VPN usage spiked, and IT teams found themselves securing kitchen-table networks and troubleshooting conference calls over Wi-Fi extenders. SD-WAN became the unsung hero—the technology that quietly kept business running when everything else stopped. It allowed organizations to secure connectivity to remote users, prioritize critical applications, and maintain performance across a wildly unpredictable landscape.
But like every great innovation, SD-WAN solved one problem and revealed another: visibility and control didn’t equal security. Routing traffic directly to the internet also invited a few million new “neighbors.”
When Networking Met Security: The SASE Framework Explained
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) isn’t a single product or appliance. It’s a framework that unifies networking and security into one cohesive, cloud-native architecture. Where SD-WAN gave organizations agility and visibility, SASE extends that foundation by weaving in identity, policy, and protection.
In practical terms, it allows previously separate technologies—SD-WAN, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS)—to collaborate under a single, centralized policy engine. Instead of stitching together a dozen different security tools, SASE makes them work as one.
For example, a healthcare provider with 200 remote clinics can use SASE to ensure every user, device, and session is authenticated and protected—all while maintaining fast access to cloud-hosted EMR systems. Compliance teams get uniform policy enforcement; users get a seamless experience.
It’s not a magic box—it’s an architectural shift that aligns connectivity and security for the way businesses actually operate today.
The Market Shift: When “Everywhere” Became the New Normal
The network perimeter used to be a line you could draw. Now, it’s more like a suggestion. The vast majority of enterprise data is now being created and processed outside the data center—by remote employees, SaaS apps, IoT devices, and just about anything with a power button and a Wi-Fi chip, or SIM.
Meanwhile, 78% of IT leaders say they’ve added more than five new security tools 🡥
in the past two years, and nearly half admit those tools rarely talk to each other. It’s the digital equivalent of buying a treadmill, a rowing machine, and a yoga mat—and still never quite getting in shape.
Complexity has become the new risk.
The Telarus Sales Engineering team sees this firsthand. One global retailer we supported had over 3,000 branch locations and a patchwork of VPNs, firewalls, and endpoint solutions—each with its own dashboard, password, and preferred method of sending alerts at 2:00 a.m. By consolidating under a SASE framework, they gained centralized policy enforcement, unified visibility, and reduced incident response time by 40%.
That’s what modernization looks like in the real world—fewer dashboards, faster decisions, and fewer reasons to “just reboot everything” when security gets messy.
Where Tech Advisors Win
For technology advisors, the shift from SD-WAN to SASE isn’t another round of acronym roulette—it’s an opening to lead real transformation. Customers aren’t just asking for faster connections anymore; they’re asking how to simplify security, enable remote work, and prepare for the next wave of cloud and AI initiatives.
Advisors who can turn those questions into strategy become indispensable. It starts with a few well-placed questions of your own:
- How confident are you that your current network can support AI workloads, cloud apps, and remote access securely and reliably?
- How are you enforcing consistent security policies across users, devices, and locations—including that one remote site with “temporary” equipment from 2018?
- What would it mean for your team if network and security management actually lived in the same dashboard?
These aren’t sales questions—they’re discovery questions. The kind that reveal pain points and open doors to meaningful outcomes: continuity, compliance, and customer experience.
And when a client answers, “We’re managing fine,” you can usually assume they mean, “We’re holding it together with duct tape, spreadsheets, and a very patient intern.” That’s your cue to help.
Advisors who guide clients from that chaos to a unified SASE framework don’t just win deals—they earn a strategic seat at the table.
From Buzzwords to Business Outcomes (and Maybe a Little Sanity)
At this point, SD-WAN and SASE sound less like technologies and more like a law firm—but they’re really two halves of the same story. SD-WAN modernized the how of networking. SASE modernized the where and how securely. Together, they’re how the enterprise prepares for a world driven by cloud, AI, and the ever-expanding “edge” that now includes your refrigerator.
This evolution isn’t about chasing the next acronym—it’s about simplifying what’s already become too complex. Clients don’t want more tools; they want better outcomes: faster performance, better protection, and one less password to forget.
That’s where the Telarus Sales Engineering team shines. We translate all the buzzwords into plain English, design frameworks that actually work, and make sure your clients see the business value behind the technology. Telarus spends every day helping advisors translate these shifts into opportunities—showing clients how modern networking isn’t just about speed or uptime anymore. It’s about security, visibility, and the ability to adapt as fast as the business does.
And if it ever feels overwhelming—the constant change, the new acronyms, the vendors all claiming to “simplify complexity” by adding three more dashboards — take a breath. You’ve got a team behind you that’s seen every phase of this evolution. We’ve connected the dots, survived the PowerPoint slides, and even laughed about it afterward.
So the next time a client says, “We think we’re fine,” smile and ask, “But are you SASE fine?”
Connect with the Telarus Sales Engineering team to help your clients build faster, safer, smarter networks — and maybe make some money along the way.
Because in the end, it’s not about selling technology.
It’s about helping businesses solve problems, and stay connected—to their business goals, their people, customers and to their sanity.