AT&T tapped Fortinet for its first managed secure access service edge (SASE) service and plans to add other SASE partners in the year ahead.

The new service, which is globally available now, uses Fortinet’s SASE stack — this includes SD-WAN and security capabilities — and it’s fully managed by AT&T Cybersecurity. Additionally, AT&T SASE with Fortinet integrates with AT&T Alien Labs Threat Intelligence platform, which provides security analysts unified visibility across clouds, networks, and endpoints.

“We saw this need last year, where customer demand started to go up on integrating security and networking and bringing a solution at scale, and that is what we’re doing,” AT&T Cybersecurity VP Rupesh Chokshi said. “We also have the threat intelligence platform, which is the Alien Labs.”

This platform collects and analyses data from sensors across networks, clouds, and endpoints and provides continuous threat intelligence, he added. “So that combination further positions AT&T uniquely” across managed SD-WAN and managed security services.

The network operator plans to update its managed SASE service with Fortinet during the year — and add new SASE partners in addition to Fortinet. “We will continue to add more functionality, and from an AT&T perspective, we will broaden our SASE portfolio as we go into 2021,” Chokshi said. “We will continue to bring more options for our customers.”

Fortinet, over the past year, has partnered with other companies on their SASE services. Security vendors including Bitglass and Zscaler, for example, integrate with Fortinet’s SD-WAN to fill that gap in their SASE stacks. Fortinet also partners with networking services company Masergy, which provides a managed SASE platform built around Fortinet’s SD-WAN, security appliances, and cloud-based firewalls.

However, as networking and security controls become more tightly converged, and organizations need to provide scalable network security to highly distributed workforces, Fortinet expects to see more network operators provide this type of tightly integrated approach.

“All of these edges appear in the network: the WAN edge, the LAN edge, the cloud edge, the data center edge, the OT edge — all of these need protecting,” Fortinet CMO and EVP of Products John Maddison said. “If you build a network, and then try and build security on top of all the edges, this becomes way too complex. And so this convergence of networking and security becomes a very important technology.”

AT&T’s tight integration with Fortinet’s SASE stack gives it an early-adopter advantage in this regard, he added. “I’ve said for a long time that our partners like AT&T should invest in this, and now they are one of the first ones to do so because they think they should own not just the transport and the SD-WAN, but lots of the SASE components as well,” Maddison said. “The issue has been that service providers just OEM something instead of trying to integrate it into the network such as AT&T is doing now.”