10 Hot SASE Companies To Watch In 2022

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) provides a fast, seamless user experience by having security enforced close to what needs securing. Here’s a look at 10 hot SASE companies fighting for a foothold.

Living On The Edge

A Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture combines a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) or other WAN with multiple security capabilities, securing an organization’s network traffic as the sum of those functions. SASE is both secure and direct, meaning that traffic from users’ devices is inspected at a nearby point of presence and sent to its destination from there, according to Zscaler.

Cloud-based SASE offers significant benefits to organizations that put aside traditional on-premises enterprise network infrastructure and security to take advantage of cloud services, mobility, and other aspects of digital transformation, Zscaler said. Rather than focusing on a secure perimeter, SASE focuses on entities such as users and pushes security and access close to users to reduce IT cost and complexity.

SASE provides a fast, seamless user experience by having security enforced close to what needs securing. By defining security as a core part of the connectivity model and not a separate function, SASE ensures that all connections are inspected and secured, no matter where users are connecting, what apps they are accessing, or what kind of encryption is in use, according to Zscaler.

From networking and firewall giants to SD-WAN, cloud, web, and zero trust security upstarts, here’s a look at 10 SASE companies fighting for a foothold in this explosive market.

Cato Networks

Cato SASE Cloud converges SD-WAN, a global private backbone, a full network security stack, and seamless support for cloud resources and mobile devices. Customers can easily connect physical locations, cloud resources, and mobile users to Cato SASE Cloud, and IT teams immediately benefit from the agility of a unified network and security service managed through a single, self-service console.

The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company enables IT teams to deliver optimized networking and powerful security to all sites, applications, and users regardless of location, and has made the provisioning of new resources fast and simple. Cato’s converged software stack maximizes visibility into network traffic and security events, allowing IT professionals configure and enforce corporate policies across the business.

Cato Networks ensures the SASE service is up-to-date and ready to optimize and secure all customer network traffic everywhere, relieving IT teams of the grunt work of maintaining infrastructure. The company dramatically simplifies the delivery of networking and security to the business, with a converged, cloud-based platform and flexible management options enabling significant cost reduction.

Check Point

Check Point Harmony Connect makes it easy to access corporate applications, SaaS and the internet for any user or branch, from any device, without compromising on security. Built to stop the most advanced cyberattacks, Harmony Connect is a cloud-native service that unifies multiple cloud-delivered network security products, deploys within minutes, and applies Zero Trust policies for a smooth user experience.

Harmony Connect provides comprehensive security from the cloud to secure remote access to enterprise applications as well as securing internet access and browsing for remote users. The San Carolos, Calif.-based company can protect direct connections from branch offices to the cloud by securing organizations’ current SD-WAN infrastructures.

Harmony Connect combines client- and cloud-based protection to deliver enterprise-grade security with less than 50 milliseconds latency and a 99.999 percent uptime. Check Point’s offering tightly integrates with leading SD-WAN services and allows organizations to scale remote access with peace of mind.

Fortinet

FortiSASE is a highly scalable cloud-delivered security service designed for securing remote users that’s powered by FortiOS and allows customers to extend FWaaS, SWG, IPS, DLP, and ZTNA to remote workers. The service simplifies the challenges of securing remote users with flexible deployment options with a best-in-class cloud-delivered security service.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company’s platform provides security-as-a-service for remote users while they are outside of the protection of the corporate network. FortiClient detects that the user is outside of the network and tunnels the traffic to the FortiSASE service where the corporate security policy can be enforced, removing the risk of corporate managed devices being unprotected on the internet.

FortiSASE offers a simple onboarding process and endpoint management, and users can forward traffic from a FortiClient agent. It enables efficient operations with granular analytics, pre-generated and on-demand reports, including granular logging and events across user, endpoint, and VPN events for efficient troubleshooting.

iboss

The iboss SASE platform provides secure internet access on any device, on any network, from any location, on any cloud. The Boston-based company’s containerized architecture allows microservices to concurrently run across multiple clouds or data centers, while single-pass scanning makes it possible to elastically scale horizontally across any cloud.

iboss’ SASE platform reduces unnecessary load on MPLS and SD-WAN branch office connections by splitting cloud traffic directly to cloud security. The offering allows customers to achieve lower latency, faster speeds, and increased productivity by bringing network security to the user instead of forcing traffic through datacenter-hosted security appliances.

iboss’ global cloud security footprint ensures close gateway capacity for fast cloud connections, while the platform’s ability to eliminate network security appliances will deliver a sustainable path for a cloud-first future. The company’s containerized cloud architecture allows for the migration of all features found in network security appliances to a Security-as-a-Service model delivered in the cloud.

Netskope

Netskope Security Service Edge (SSE) delivers advanced threat protection against cloud-enabled threats and safeguards data across any cloud, any application, or any user. The platform offers customers deep visibility across all traffic, including web and SaaS applications, cloud services, and private applications, providing granular control over activities that enable customers to secure their remote workforce.

Explicit and granular access controls across applications, application instances, and application activities reduce the attack surface against threat vectors like risky cloud apps, cloud phishing of sanctioned app credentials. Netskope incorporates deep learning models into AI/ML-based image classification for content detection of passports, government IDs, credit cards, social security cards, and other data types.

With global coverage, efficient traffic processing, low-latency on-ramps and extensive peering, the Netskope NewEdge security private cloud delivers SSE without performance trade-offs to boost productivity and business agility. With 99.999% uptime & availability plus industry-leading latency SLAs for traffic processing, customers can be confident Netskope services remain up and highly available.

Open Systems

Open Systems’ SASE+ secures users no matter where they work, is centrally managed and easy to expand, and delivers direct, fast, and reliable connections to the internet and cloud. The platform does all that with a single unified service that’s cloud-delivered, policy-driven, automated, and seamlessly orchestrated, and can support ZTNA to include even more users working on a broader range of devices.

SASE+ customers are backed by Open Systems’ global team of security experts who monitor their environment around the clock and are ready to assist with whatever they need when they need it. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company’s platform connects users, machines, apps, and data in a highly performant and reliable way from anywhere to anywhere.

Open Systems SASE+ protects users, apps, and data from web threats as well as malicious access and misuse. The platform also offers unrivaled service, a multi-functional customer portal, 24×7 expert-level operations, and continuous technical consulting.

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE converges best-of-breed security with best-of-breed next-gen SD-WAN into a cloud-delivered platform. It consolidates multiple point products, including ZTNA, Cloud SWG, next-gen CASB, FWaaS, SD-WAN and ADEM into a single integrated service, reducing network and security complexity while increasing organizational agility.

Prisma SASE consistently secures all apps used by an organization’s hybrid workforce, regardless of whether users are remote, mobile, or working from a branch office. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s proven cloud-delivered security services leverage ML-powered threat prevention to instantly stop 95% of web-based threats inline, significantly reducing the risk of a data breach.

Prisma SASE includes the industry’s only SASE-native Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) that helps ensure an exceptional experience for an organization’s end-users. With end-to-end visibility and insights across both mobile and branch users, guaranteed by performance SLAs that are 10x better than the closest competitors, a company’s employees will be happier and more productive.

Perimeter 81

Perimeter 81’s multi-regional SASE network provides a comprehensive set of converged secure network capabilities, delivered and managed over a multi-tenant cloud, providing a secure and highly-scalable network for organizations everywhere. The platform offers Firewall as a Service which protects site-centric networks from potential threats, while adding modern security features for next-gen firewalls.

The company’s SASE platform will include CASB functionality, so customers can extend security policy to their cloud service provider’s architecture and further protect it from uninvited users or apps. The Tel Aviv, Israel-based company’s platform will soon incorporate SWG utility for customers who want to protect their employees who surf the web from accidental malware infection.

Perimeter 81’s product will soon offer complete endpoint security and compliance for organizations including next-generation malware protection and support for visibility into encrypted traffic. SASE is built on SD-WAN and uses it to simply control all infrastructure, including hardware and software, with a centralized solution that greatly simplifies management of the network.

Versa Networks

Versa SASE delivers a comprehensive integrated offering within a single software stack which mitigates the need to perform service chaining, cascading, or virtual interconnect between SASE services required by other tools in the market. The offering combines full-featured SD-WAN, complete integrated security, advanced scalable routing, genuine multi-tenancy, and sophisticated analytics into one software image.

Versa SASE delivers visibility and control through a single pane of glass, protecting all corporate resources with unified security policies for every session for every user, on any device, accessing any application. Security is embedded which results in no security breakage from service chaining which leads to better security hygiene, true access authenticity and only one point of decryption.

Key Versa SASE services available via the cloud, on-premises, or as a blended combination of both. The San Jose, Calif.-based company’s technology enables and delivers consistent security policies, network policies, business policies, user policies, and application policies seamlessly between on-premises and cloud services.

Zscaler

The Zscaler Cloud Security Platform is a SASE service built from the ground up for performance and scalability. As a globally distributed platform, users are always a short hop to their applications, and through peering with hundreds of partners in major internet exchanges around the world, the San Jose, Calif.-based cloud security vendor provides optimal performance and reliability for your users.

The Zscaler SASE architecture helps accelerate cloud adoption by removing network and security friction, consolidating and simplifying IT services, and eliminating the need for device management. The Zscaler platform globally peers at the edge with leading application and service providers and optimizes traffic routing to provide the best user experience.

As a fully cloud-delivered service, Zscaler provides native app segmentation by using business policies to connect an authenticated user to an authorized app without bringing the user on the network. Adversaries can’t attack what they can’t see, which is why the Zscaler architecture hides source identities by obfuscating their IP addresses and avoids exposing the corporate network to the internet.