Oracle jumped into the secure access service edge (SASE) market today with a Check Point partnership. The deal merges Oracle SD-WAN and Session Border Controller (SBC) with Check Point’s Quantum Edge virtual security gateway and its Harmony Connect cloud-based firewall service.

The partners bundled the software pieces into a single SASE platform that provides protection across layers 1 to 4, wrote Douglas Tait, director product marketing for Oracle Communications, in a blog post.

Plus, if customers require additional cloud-based security, they can add an IPsec tunnel to other cloud-based security services from either Check Point or Zscaler. And if they require a local firewall, Oracle’s Talari SD-WAN can load in the Quantum Edge Firewall. Adding in the FIPS/JITC-certified Oracle SBC provides protection at the session layer with high-availability Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling, SIP denial of service/distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention, and dynamic access control.

“By integrating the SD-WAN, SBC, and Check Point, you can detect malicious call signatures and behaviors, and get real-time risk assessments for each call through dashboards that provides a 360-degree view of the network’s telecom traffic,” Tait wrote.

The SASE platform also uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based analytics to provide real-time risk assessments, and it provides a “reputation score” based on behavioral threat analytics, threat signature detection, and anomaly detection, he added. “These actions culminate in a score for each call so that policies can be applied for each class of reputation score, in alignment with risk policies, such as killing malicious or fraudulent calls.”

SASE platforms provide an edge-based architecture to deliver networking and security technologies. While SASE was popular before COVID-19, the pandemic and seemingly overnight need to secure remote workers made SASE almost a necessity for most businesses.

Most tech execs and industry analysts are forecasting hybrid work well into the future. Verizon’s latest mobile threat report found 78% of businesses expect remote work to remain higher than before COVID-19 before settling at about 48%. And this means SASE is likely here to stay.

Oracle, however, is a fairly late entrant into the SASE market. At this point all of the major networking and security vendors including Cisco, Juniper Networks, VMware, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks offer their own SASE platform. Meanwhile other security companies like Zscaler and Bitglass integrate their security stacks with SD-WAN providers for their own versions of SASE.

All of this means Oracle has some catching up to do before it gains SASE ground and market share.