Palo Alto Networks Inc. today announced new capabilities to boost its single-vendor secure access service edge or SASE solution with features to secure the “internet of things” and automate branch management with artificial intelligence-powered capabilities.

The improvements to Palo Alto’s Prisma SASE are designed to enable organizations to automate their increasingly complex information technology and network operations center functions through the natively integrated AIOps. Palo Alto calls this Autonomous Digital Experience Management, with Prisma SASE customers gaining end-to-end observability across their networks.

With the addition of AIOps, ADEM helps customers automate complex IT and network operations center functions while increasing productivity and reducing mean time to resolution. Because ADEM is integrated within Prisma SASE, it does not require additional appliances or agents to be deployed.

Benefits of AIOps for ADEM include the ability proactively to remediate issues that can cause service interruption through AI-based problem detection and predictive analytics. Using the functionality, users can isolate issues faster through an easy-to-use query interface and quickly discover network anomalies from a single dashboard.

New SD-WAN innovations for Palo Alto Networks extend zero trust to the “Branch of the Future” with digitized SASE that converges software-defined wide-area networks with a cloud-delivered secure service edge or SSE. The upgrade is said to help organizations simplify management, get consistent visibility, and leverage AI and machine learning for smarter decision-making.

Palo Alto Networks is introducing three SD-WAN innovations, starting with Prisma SD-WAN Command Center. The Command Center provides AI-powered and segment-wise insights, along with always-on monitoring for network and apps for proactive problem resolution at the branch level. With the Command Center dashboard, IT obtains visibility into organization-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. That enables accurate detection and identification of branch IoT devices. Customers can set robust security controls from within the familiar cloud management for Prisma SASE.

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

Cloud SWG, with agent-based proxy support and phishing detection, assists organizations with proxy-based architectures that are looking to migrate to a SASE-based Cloud Secure Web Gateway. Palo Alto is introducing agent-based explicit proxy support with Prisma Access to enable such customers to benefit from superior cloud-delivered security without the need for networking changes, even allowing the coexistence with third-party virtual private network agents.

Prisma Access Cloud SWG uses Palo Alto’s advanced URL filtering to prevent unknown and highly evasive “man-in-the-middle” and software-as-a-service platform phishing attacks. Prisma Access Cloud SWG is claimed to stay ahead of threat actors to secure customers with its AI- and machine learning-powered detections.

“With so many organizations adopting SASE, it is important to understand that in order to reap the full benefits, they need to move toward a single-vendor SASE approach,” Kumar Ramachandran, senior vice president for products for SASE, said in a statement. “A mix-and-match approach increases complexity and makes it challenging to be proactive or isolate issues. With an integrated Prisma SASE, organizations can harness the power of AI across networking and security to enable a great user experience.”

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

Image: Palo Alto Networks