SAN FRANCISCO - Juniper Networks added Cloud Access Security Broker and data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities to its security services edge (SSE) portfolio. And the vendor claims it now provides a full-stack secure access service edge (SASE) solution offering stepwise transition and security consistency.

“We're the industry's first and only full-stack SASE solution that allows the customer to leverage what they have today, extending that to the cloud and giving them more visibility and insight to whatever it is they need to secure,” Samantha Madrid, Group VP of security business and strategy at Juniper Networks, told SDxCentral in an interview during RSA Conference.

Prior to the latest expansion, Juniper’s SASE portfolio had most of the core SASE components identified by Gartner, including SD-WAN, secure web gateway, CASB, zero-trust network access, and firewall-as-a-service. All the components have the ability to encrypt and decrypt content at line speed and at scale while continually monitoring sessions for risk — but the vendor partnered with Netskope for CASB.

Last Summer, the network giant introduced Security Director Cloud, its policy management platform, which forms the backbone of the vendor’s security portfolio and enables customers to manage all of their firewalls and security services using the same policies from a centralized dashboard. In February, it added a cloud-based firewall service, dubbed Secure Edge, into the SASE portfolio.

With the new CASB and DLP capabilities, the SASE service can prevent unauthorized access to data residing in the cloud by allowing only validated users to have access and create identity-based micro-perimeters around users, Software-as-a-Service applications, and the data within them, Juniper claims.

Dell’Oro Group last year named VMware, Cato, and Versa Networks as vendors offering a truly “unified SASE” platform, according to the firm’s Network Security Market report.

Dell’Oro analysts identified unified SASE vendors as the ones that offer all five core networking and security functions — SD-WAN, secure web gateway, zero-trust network access, CASB, and cloud firewalls — and have managed to integrate them into a single converged product.

Madrid touted Juniper’s full-stack SASE portfolio not only providing those core functions, but also offering a single policy framework and “the ability for the customer to take what they have today, leverage that and automatically translate it into their network of the future.”

The reason Juniper took the full-stack path is that the whole network architecture should be able to have the same security efficacy in every delivery option including on-premise, virtual, cloud, or SaaS.

“It's full-stack because it's a single policy framework … it was so important for us to make sure that we could have that consistency,” she added. “But what has happened in the market is that we have different solutions for different parts of the network. There's no cohesion.”

Another differentiator for Juniper's SASE service Madrid claims is helping organizations use their existing security policies and extend them to SASE starting with SD-WAN or SSE or both.

“What we're doing is we're enabling a customer to take their SASE journey at their pace,” she said. “I think the real value that we're bringing to market is the ability for the customer to take what they have today, leverage that, and automatically translate it into their network of the future.”

For that transition, customers need a SASE vendor to partner with them and help them, she said. “They don't need individual products. They need a complete unified experience, they need unified policy manageability with consistent security, and I really believe that delivering on that is absolutely addressing where the market is going.”