Lacework rolled out its security service edge (SSE) solution, dubbed Lacework Edge. Complementing its existing cloud native application protection platform (cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP), the vendor aims to extend the security capabilities to the users and networks at the edge.

The cloud security vendor began building the SSE solution from the ground up a little under three years ago in stealth. The decision to enter this market was driven by demand from Lacework’s customers and an awareness of existing gaps in the market.

“Lacework has been successful in building a unified, data-driven CNAPP platform that transformed cloud security, and many of our customers asked us about the SSE market,” Trevor Welsh, VP of product at Lacework, told SDxCentral. “We became increasingly interested in where the gaps were: Most SSE vendors approached SSE as a connectivity or security problem, but nobody looked at network security as a data problem that could be resolved by analyzing user risk and behavior in real time.”

Lacework Edge’s core technologies and capabilities

Coined by Gartner, SSE is an evolution of the phrase secure access service edge (SASE) for a security framework that safeguards access to the web, cloud services and private applications regardless of user location, device or application hosting. Its core technologies include zero-trust network access (ZTNA), firewall-as-a-service (FaaS), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB) and decryption.

Welsh claims Lacework Edge secures access to internal platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for all employees, contractors and partners anywhere in the world by evaluating the risk of each connection request using real-time user and device context, which replaces the need for traditional network security tools like VPNs.

It is also designed to secure web access with advanced SWG capabilities including DNS reputation checks, malware detection, web filtering policy enforcement and shadow IT management.

In addition, Lacework Edge helps companies securely use generative artificial intelligence (genAI) by protecting the data. For example, it can detect unauthorized attempts to paste legal documents, code, or other sensitive information and prevent it from ever being uploaded, according to Welsh.

Lacework’s SSE builds on global networks of AWS and Google Cloud

Lacework claims unlike other legacy SSE solutions that suffer from performance limitations due to outdated infrastructure and poorly consolidated point products, the Lacework Edge leverages global networks of cloud service providers (CSPs) like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud.

“When building Lacework Edge, we thought really carefully about the tradeoffs of building in modern CSPs versus putting together our own data centers,” Welsh said. “Today, CSPs like Google and AWS not only have the fastest networks in the world with dedicated undersea fiber, which assures the lowest latency, but also have the most points of presence (POPs). This means that employees all over the world can access apps with the greatest bandwidth and lowest latency. ”

“Leveraging CSPs also means that we can spawn a new POP for Lacework Edge in minutes, instead of building out data centers over the course of months, or even years,” he added.

Complementing CNAPP use cases

Lacework recognizes security as a data and context challenge, so it used the same ideology to build the SSE solution leveraging the same behavioral engine as its CNAPP solution.

Welsh noted Lacework’s CNAPP provides insights into attack surfaces and effective threat prevention by collecting comprehensive data across the application lifecycle.

“Lacework Cloud Security uniquely solved for what is inside of your cloud, and understanding the complex interactions of workloads,” he said. “We saw an opportunity to understand more about who was accessing these workloads. This precipitated the creation of SSE, and gave us the chance to provide Lacework’s unique in-workload context to Edge to make access decisions. It also enabled Edge to provide Lacework Cloud with unique context about the posture and who was attempting to access the cloud resource.”

Welsh highlighted the synergy between the two products, “Taking a proactive approach to security, Lacework Edge intercepts attacks earlier in the attack life cycle, complementing CNAPP use cases for existing users. The two work seamlessly to streamline investigations by giving the ability to conduct full root cause analysis.”

“For those SSE companies that do not have the CNAPP background like Lacework, getting the context of cloud when making decisions in an SSE product requires more M&A, or even whiteboxing — yet another solution,” he added. “As Lacework Cloud security gets better, so does Lacework Edge, and vice versa. Lacework’s customers are huge beneficiaries of this feedback loop.”