Benu Networks teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) today to expand its telecom-focused secure access service edge (SASE) and broadband network gateways (BNG) beyond the reach of operators' existing infrastructure.

Founded in 2010, Benu specializes in BNGs. These physical or virtual appliances sit at the network edge and provide authentication services for internet service providers like Comcast and Liberty Global. These BNGs formed the basis for which Benu's white-label SASE platform, announced early last year, is deployed and managed.

The idea was rather than having to pay cloud or colocation providers for compute resources, telecoms could utilize their existing infrastructure to host their own SASE architecture at lower cost and greater scalability, the company claimed.

“We’re essentially giving operators the opportunity to become their own Zscaler,” Michael McFarland, VP of product management at Benu Networks, said. “They can take our software. It provides all the connectivity from the enterprise to the points of presence, but also gives them the option to sell either MPLS or SASE or a combination of both.”

Today’s partnership with AWS enables customers to host Benu’s SASE platform on AWS Regions, AWS Outposts, and its containerized BNG on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service.

The integration enables telecoms to support both local and multinational customers.

“We’ve partnered with AWS so they can run this infrastructure not just in their own points or presence, but outside the carrier footprint,” McFarland said. “If you’re trying to deal with an international enterprise organization, you might have to serve them in countries that don’t have a point of presence today.”

“By having the partnership with AWS, we can allow them to respond to any request for proposal and be confident that they can support essentially any location in the world,” he added.

While Benu claims a SASE architecture, it's far from complete. “We have the ZTNA, which is sort of foundational in terms of identifying the user and then setting up the policies for that user,” McFarland said.

In addition to zero-trust network access (ZTNA), Benu also offers a cloud-based firewall and malware detection and prevention. “The services that just about any business would want," he said.

The vendor doesn’t, however, offer cloud access security broker (CASB) or secure web gateway. For those capabilities, Benu partners with third-party security vendors like Palo Alto Networks to enable network operators to offer differentiated services.

“For the enterprise, if they’ve already made an investment in one of those vendors, they can continue to leverage that,” McFarland said. “The idea is that the carrier can create an almost mini marketplace of leading solutions for CASB or various other aspects of security. That way the carrier isn’t just addressing one particular part of the market.”