Secure Access Service Edge Services

Secure Access Service Edge Services is the new name of a category Forrester last scored as Zero Trust Edge Service Providers, and the report under the new name is already published. It also sits one word away from a different Forrester category, Secure Access Service Edge Solutions, which evaluates something else entirely. A buyer who reads the two documents as interchangeable builds the wrong shortlist.

The planned flag on this category is out of date by three weeks. The Forrester Wave: Secure Access Service Edge Services, Q3 2026 went live on July 24, 2026. The Solutions edition is published too, and has been since September 8, 2025. What the calendar still calls planned has been public for a while now, and the public record is more interesting than the paperwork.

Two evaluations, one word apart

Forrester now runs two parallel evaluations of this market, separated by a single word. The word is doing the buying.

The Solutions Wave scores the platforms themselves. The Q3 2025 edition evaluated eight vendors that ship SD-WAN and security service edge as one single-console product, and named Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler Leaders. That scorecard is a product review, and it answers a different question.

The Services Wave scores the companies paid to deliver SASE as an operating outcome. Underlay. Operations. SLAs. Change windows. The providers who answer the phone when the branch goes dark.

The distinction matters because the two purchases sit on separate lines of the same purchase order. An enterprise can buy the platform from a security vendor and the delivery from a service provider. The one-word boundary in Forrester's catalog is the market's own boundary, written down.

What gets scored when the product is an operating model

SASE itself stopped being the argument years ago. Networking and security delivered from the cloud edge, one policy plane, SD-WAN plus secure web gateway plus ZTNA in a single fabric. The product half of the market settled. What never settled is who runs it.

The services layer is where the hard parts of the problem live. The last-mile underlay that nobody owns end to end. The carrier contracts in countries where the carrier is effectively a law. The plant floor that cannot sit dark through a maintenance window. The store whose MPLS contract finally expired and whose migration nobody wanted to own.

The 2024 edition's criteria list is a telecom procurement checklist. Service delivery platform. Last-mile underlay. Partner ecosystem. Adoption. Those are not feature names. They are procurement categories, and they reveal what the category was about from the start.

The term that lost the naming war

Forrester coined Zero Trust Edge as its answer to Gartner's SASE. The market picked Gartner's word. That happens more often than either firm would admit, and this time the renaming took years to reach the title pages.

The services side held out longest. The Forrester Wave: Zero Trust Edge Service Providers, Q2 2024, published April 29, 2024, evaluated nine vendors on 34 criteria. Two came out Leaders: Open Systems and Vodafone Business.

Open Systems took the highest possible scores in 16 of those criteria, including service delivery platform, networking and security services, last-mile underlay, vision, innovation, roadmap, and adoption. Forrester called its record of shipping partner-requested features in 10 weeks or less "unmatched," and reference customers pushed its NPS above 60. Vodafone was judged "a top choice for organisations that seek breadth and depth of technology coverage with a focus on experience assurance," with "unparalleled experience assurance capabilities" built on application-level SLA guarantees.

Then the renames arrived. The product side became Secure Access Service Edge Solutions in Q3 2025, succeeding a 2023 edition published under the Zero Trust Edge name. The services side followed in July 2026. The old name left the catalog without ceremony.

The scorecard that published anyway: The Forrester Wave: Secure Access Service Edge Services, Q3 2026

The report that corrected the planned flag is The Forrester Wave: Secure Access Service Edge Services, Q3 2026, published July 24, 2026. The author is Octavio Garcia Granados, a Forrester senior analyst whose coverage spans networking services, telecom services, and SASE services.

The full vendor field has not surfaced publicly yet. As of mid-August 2026, exactly one provider has announced its placement. Open Systems, the Zurich-based operator with more than 35 years of managed network experience by its own count, was named a Leader on July 28, 2026, alongside the launch of its Autonomous SASE operating model.

Forrester's citation is unusually direct about where this market moved. Open Systems' "vision redefines SASE services, shifting the focus away from tech vendor selection to outcomes for industrial, AI, and edge use cases that go beyond traditional user to cloud connectivity." The report states the firm "sets the market standard in delivering agile, highly automated, and expert-level support that focuses on operational outcomes," and concludes it is "an excellent fit for organizations that value operational and industry-specific outcomes over alignment with specific vendors."

The scored strengths are the operating model itself. Delivery architecture. Regional sales and operational presence. Technology extensibility. Autonomous ops. Digital twin capabilities. Networking and security layer integration. Support for highly distributed apps and devices. A "stellar roadmap" addressing Zero Trust benchmarking, sovereignty, agentic AIOps, and AI security. Customers in the evaluation reported high satisfaction with the self-developed tech stack and its "directly accessible and responsive" expert support.

One announced placement is not a scorecard, and the rest of the field will not be invented here. What the public record offers instead is the boundary line the report draws: a services Wave that grades the operator, not the network.

The shift got scored

Set the 2026 citation next to the 2024 criteria list and the two editions stop reading like the same evaluation. The 2024 scorecard graded what a provider runs. The 2026 scorecard grades the shift that runs it.

Autonomous ops, digital twin, agentic AIOps. The automation layer has become a scored criterion, and so has the human layer underneath it. "Expert-level support" that is "directly accessible and responsive" is not a footnote in a services Wave. It is the category. A digital twin of your network is a promise you can audit. A roadmap that puts sovereignty and Zero Trust benchmarking on the same slide is a provider telling you which buying questions it expects.

The platform was never the decision. The schedule that keeps it alive was. What a buyer actually purchases is the operating model around the box: who answers at 3 a.m. in the time zone of the branch, who owns the outage bridge with the carrier, who benchmarks zero trust maturity instead of selling the tools to do it yourself.

Two years and one rename later, the Wave grades who answers the phone, not what the phone runs.

The gap between the promise and the SLA

A managed service is a promise with an SLA attached, and a scorecard three weeks old cannot tell you which promises the automation keeps and which ones a human still keeps. Agentic AIOps is roadmap language. Ask what happens when the agent cannot autoremediate. The answer is a person, and that person is the thing you are actually buying.

Outsourcing delivery does not outsource accountability. The SLA pays credits. The outage pays customers. No Wave edition measures the gap between those two currencies.

There is a quieter observation, and it cuts the other way. The name changed, and the top of the scorecard did not. Open Systems was a Leader in the 2024 edition under the old name and is a Leader in the 2026 edition under the new one. Continuity at the top while the vocabulary churns underneath usually means the operating layer settled, even as the naming did not.

The other scorecard, one shelf over

The Secure Access Service Edge Solutions Wave of Q3 2025, authored by Andre Kindness and colleagues and published September 8, 2025, scores the platform vendors. Eight made the field, and Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, and Zscaler lead it. Gartner runs its own adjacent evaluation of the platform question, the Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE.

The buyer's job is to keep the two questions apart on purpose. Which platform. Which operator. The product Wave answers the first. This services Wave answers the second. Confusing them is how an enterprise ends up with a brilliant platform and nobody on call.

Questions the platform scorecard cannot answer

The platform scorecard will not answer any of the following, and they decide the deal.

Who runs the last mile. Name the countries you actually trade in, then ask which carriers, which contracts, and which escalation paths come with them.

What the automation hands off. When the agentic ops layer cannot fix an incident, who answers, in which time zone, with which change rights on your equipment.

Which SLA pays cash. Separate the guarantees that pay money from the ones that pay credits, and ask to see the provider's own telemetry on both for the last 12 months.

Who benchmarks zero trust maturity. If the roadmap promises Zero Trust benchmarking, ask for the most recent benchmark of a customer your size, findings included.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

This pairs closely with Enterprise Firewall Solutions, where forrester's own announcement blog is titled Old Dogs Learn New Tricks, and it records the vendor that led the category in 2020, lost its seat in 2022, and clawed back to the top with the most maximum scores in the field.