Palo Alto Networks introduces AI-powered SASE

Source: Palo Alto Networks. A unified SASE is ideal, the company said.

Palo Alto Networks has announced new capabilities to boost its single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) solution, enabling organisations to automate their IT and network operations centre (NOC) functions.

Palo Alto Networks has also announced features to secure Internet of Things (IoT) and automate branch management. With new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities, organisations can rely on Prisma SASE to generate better security outcomes and unlock operational efficiencies, the company said.

According to the Gartner 2022 Roadmap for SASE Convergence report*, by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access using a SASE/SSE architecture, up from 20% in 2021. SSE stands for security service edge.

“With so many organisations adopting SASE, it is important to understand that in order to reap the full benefits, they need to move towards a single-vendor SASE approach. A mix-and-match approach increases complexity and makes it challenging to be proactive or isolate issues,” said Kumar Ramachandran, Senior VP for Products, SASE, Palo Alto Networks. 

“With an integrated Prisma SASE, organisations can harness the power of AI across networking and security to enable a great user experience.”

“We recently completed a Zero Trust implementation using Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE and we have already seen significant improvements in the strength of our security posture,” said Kenneth Ogami, Senior VP and CIO, US, Westfield, which has a presence in Australia. 

“We simultaneously deployed SD-WAN** from Palo Alto Networks and massively reduced the complexity and cost of our network management, which is critical in retail right now. With the new AI-powered capabilities, we expect to simplify our network management even further to reduce costs, not to mention strengthening our overall security posture even more.”

Autonomous digital experience management (ADEM) provides Prisma SASE customers end-to-end observability across their network to enable a great user experience. Now with the addition of AIOps, ADEM will help customers automate complex IT and NOC functions while increasing productivity and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). Since ADEM is integrated within Prisma SASE it does not require additional appliances or agents to be deployed. The benefits that AIOps for ADEM can deliver include:

● Proactively remediate issues that can cause service interruption through AI-based problem detection and predictive analytics.

● Isolate issues faster (reduced MTTR) through an easy-to-use query interface.

● Simply and quickly discover network anomalies from a single dashboard.

According to Palo Alto Networks, the strength of SASE is that it converges SD-WAN with a cloud-delivered SSE, helping organisations simplify management, get consistent visibility and leverage AI/machine learning (ML) for smarter decision-making.

Palo Alto Networks is introducing three SD-WAN innovations:

● Prisma SD-WAN Command Center provides AI-powered and segment-wise insights and always-on monitoring for network and apps for proactive problem resolution at the branch level. With a comprehensive Command Center dashboard, IT gets visibility into organisation-wide application experience and health, enabling expedited root cause analysis.

● Prisma SD-WAN with integrated IoT security allows existing Prisma SD-WAN appliances to help secure IoT devices. This enables accurate detection and identification of branch IoT devices. Customers can now enable robust security controls from within the familiar cloud management for Prisma SASE. Other SD-WAN solutions require additional appliances and sensors to be deployed in the network to gain visibility into IoT devices and prevent threats.

● On-Prem Controller for Prisma SD-WAN helps customers meet their industry-specific security compliance requirements and works with on-prem and cloud controller deployments. Customers can now choose to deploy Prisma SD-WAN using the cloud management console, on-prem controllers or both in a hybrid scenario.

Some organisations with proxy-based architectures that need to meet industry-specific requirements are looking to migrate to a SASE-based cloud secure web gateway (SWG). Palo Alto Networks is introducing agent-based explicit proxy support with Prisma Access to enable such customers to benefit from cloud-delivered security without the need for networking changes, including allowing coexistence with third-party VPN agents. 

Prisma Access cloud SWG stays ahead of threat actors to secure customers with its AI/ML-powered detections. Prisma Access Cloud SWG uses Palo Alto Networks Advanced URL Filtering to provide the real-time prevention of unknown and highly evasive man-in-the-middle (MitM) phishing attacks. Advanced URL Filtering can also help prevent software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform phishing attacks. 

"Organisations are rapidly adopting SASE frameworks, driving innovation for both SD-WAN and SSE. With today's announcements for Prisma SD-WAN, Palo Alto Networks is demonstrating their commitment to innovation, not just in cloud-delivered security, but in a tightly integrated single-vendor SASE solution that includes industry-leading SD-WAN. 

"Enabling customers to secure IoT devices in branch offices and providing end-to-end visibility to determine branch health utilising the new SD-WAN Command Center will help them differentiate themselves in the mature SD-WAN market," said Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group at the time of the launch.

Details

All new capabilities will be available by May 2023, except the Prisma SD-WAN Command
Center, which will be available by July 2023.

*Gartner, 2022 Strategic Roadmap for SASE Convergence, Neil MacDonald, Andrew Lerner, John Watts, 24 June 2022. 

**SD WAN stands for software-defined wide area network.