McAfee is rolling zero-trust network access (ZTNA) into its Unified Cloud Edge secure access service edge (SASE) platform thanks to integrations with not one vendor, but three.

Appgate, Axis Security, and TransientX today joined McAfee’s Security Innovation Alliance, which seeks to promote an open-provider approach to ZTNA, Sadik Al-Abdulla, VP of product management at McAfee, explained.

To date, McAfee’s SASE has largely focused its energy on the security stack, with cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), and data loss prevention (DLP) forming the core of the Unified Cloud Edge platform, he said. However, for network access, like SD-WAN and now ZTNA vendors, the company has chosen to partner with third-party vendors, he explained.

“We can deliver a tremendous amount of context about a machine, whether it's managed or unmanaged, whether various security clients are present and whether they're running, whether they're in a good state, whether their last scan came up clean,” Al-Abdulla said. “That entire framework of posture, we are making available for the ZTNA providers to make policy decisions on application access and application behavior.”

In addition to API-level integrations for communicating posture data, McAfee is also extending unified management and provisioning to each of its ZTNA partners.

“This provides customers with the best option for their environment, enhancing their deployment with valuable intelligence from the McAfee ecosystem,” Javed Hasan, global head of product strategy and alliances, said in a statement.

The integrations, however, stop short of the single pass inspection architecture, outlined in Gartner Research’s SASE definition.

“We’re not doing a DLP or threat integration at this time. It’s a management integration; it’s a posture integration,” Al-Abdulla said.

But while a single pass ZTNA offering through McAfee isn’t currently available, Al-Abdulla said it wasn’t out of the question, and teased a possible in-house ZTNA platform that would leverage the wealth of data mined by McAfee’s endpoint security platform to inform policy decisions.

The update comes just over a week after McAfee announced its intent to sell its enterprise security business to Symphony Technology Group (STG) in an all-cash deal worth $4 billion.

McAfee, which went public less than six months ago, now plans to pivot to a pure-play customer cybersecurity company.

The sale “will unleash our consumer business as our singular focus going forward while unlocking the value of our enterprise business at a very attractive valuation,” McAfee CEO Peter Leav said, on a conference call last week.

The acquisition marks the second high-profile acquisition by STG in a little over a year. The company paid $2 billion to take RSA off Dell Technology's hands in February 2020.