In the highly competitive security services edge (SSE) market, Skyhigh Security CEO Gee Rittenhouse believes protecting data is equally and perhaps more important than controlling access.

If you can’t protect the data itself, “you’re missing a large fraction of the important data from an Enterprise perspective,” said Rittenhouse, who joined Skyhigh, formerly McAfee Enterprise’s secure access service edge (SASE) business, in January.

“A lot of people focus on just restricting the access, having zero-trust principles, and making sure it’s to the Application not the network,” he explained. “That’s great, and we absolutely applaud that, and it’s a great industry transformation, but what happens after I have access, if I’m sharing something?”

It’s not enough to control access to the data, the SSE platform needs to protect the data itself, he explained. If an attacker gains access to a data registry or a collaboration platform, there has to be protections in place to prevent the unauthorized modification or distribution of that data, he added.

“If I start sharing screenshots and allowing you to take pictures of sensitive data, that is not secure, and so the issue of data is as important as the access,” Rittenhouse said.

This data-centric approach to security is nothing new to Rittenhouse or Skyhigh. McAfee Enterprise — prior to Symphony Technology Group’s (STG) decision to spin off the company’s SASE and extended detection and response (XDR) businesses as Skyhigh and Trellix, respectively — long embraced this data-first philosophy.

At the heart of Skyhigh’s offering is McAfee’s Mvision platform, which includes all of the SASE security features you’d expect: Cloud Access Security Broker, secure web gateway (SWG), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and of course DLP.

These technologies, DLP in particular, form the basis for what Skyhigh is now calling a “data-aware” SSE platform.

“We think of the data-loss prevention, particularly on the endpoint, as a competitive differentiator than just cloud-only providers,” Rittenhouse said. “No matter where your data sits, and moves, and collaborates, and is shared, and is created, that policy and that security follows that data.”

Beyond protecting customers data, Rittenhouse sees an opportunity for SSE to reduce the burden faced by many security teams today.

“In the security industry for quite some time, there’s been this recognition that there’s just not enough security professionals to deal with all the issues out there,” he said. “We’ve left a lot of the complexity and integration to our customers and those professionals.”

“One of the reasons for that is because you’re trying to protect your Enterprise, your data, and your users by stitching together various technologies,” he added.

SSE, Rittenhouse explains, consolidates many essential security abilities into a single product stack, and in the case of Skyhigh, establishes the perimeter around the data itself.

Skyhigh isn’t however trying to be the end-all and be-all of Enterprise security, and maintains the importance of integrating with leading XDR and SD-WAN vendors.

“There are strong market recognized leaders in networking that served customers very, very well. So adding that to our offer probably isn’t the best way of serving our customers,” he explained.

While Rittenhouse has no ambition to break into the SD-WAN market, he argues that networking as a function remains pivotal. “How companies connect to this cloud, how they do traffic shaping, how they do load balancing around this cloud, those are very important elements,” he added.

In this regard, Skyhigh is taking steps to integrate with leading SD-WAN vendors to reduce the complexity of deploying and managing a multi-vendor SASE architecture.

Skyhigh also retains a close relationship with its sibling Trellix's XDR platform.

“The fact that Trellix’s endpoint has a cloud capability to it enhances the endpoint more than a loose integration around an Application Programming Interface,” Rittenhouse said, arguing the company’s deep integration with Trellix is another key differentiator.