At first blush, Oracle’s entrance into the red-hot secure access service edge (SASE) market isn’t all that surprising. To date, nearly every SD-WAN vendor has debuted some kind of SASE architecture. But Oracle isn’t just an SD-WAN vendor, it’s a public cloud provider too.

For the most part, SASE products today are either offered as an all-in-one networking and security platform or pieced together joining SD-WAN from one vendor with security from another. Oracle’s SASE offering, announced earlier this month, falls into the latter camp. The company has long-standing partnerships with Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, and recently has added Check Point to the mix.

But there are a couple of notable differences that set the vendor apart from other companies — VMware, Aruba, and Aryaka come to mind — that achieve a SASE architecture by similar means.

For one, Oracle is also one of the first, if not the first, public cloud provider to enter the SASE space. And unlike other SASE partnerships, Oracle is only relying on outside security vendors for a narrow patch of the SASE security stack: cloud-based and edge firewalls, explained Doug Tait, director of product marketing, networks at Oracle.

Oracle’s SASE debut highlighted the ability for Talari SD-WAN customers to load Check Point’s Quantum Edge next-generation firewall onto the company’s E100 edge appliances or deploy the security vendor’s Harmony Connect firewall as a cloud instance.

Tait adds that this isn’t unique to Check Point, and customers can also choose from Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler depending on their preference.

“The quantum edge on top of our E100, that married with our SD-WAN functionality, gave us a good deal of the SASE functionality,” he said.

According to Tait, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) already offers secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, and zero-trust network access — three of the four core security competencies outlined in Gartner’s SASE definition. The only thing that’s missing is the firewall.

“The only cloud base SASE stack that we don't offer right now would be that next-gen firewall at the edge,” Tait said. “That's where we had to rely on our best of breed partners.”

Oracle’s implementation of secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, and zero-trust network access is, however, somewhat limited in that it is highly focused on workloads running in its cloud, with some support for workloads running in Microsoft Azure, Tait admits. Competing platforms from Check Point, Zscaler, and Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, tend to be cloud-agnostic, allowing customers to extend secure access to multi-cloud providers.

So, with the exception of next-generation firewalls — something Tait said many customers don't even need — Oracle not only wants to deliver SD-WAN and secure access, but it also wants to host your workloads too.

By delivering these services as part of a cloud offering, Oracle is able to provide SASE-like secure access to workloads running in OCI with the same kind of performance emphasis as the company’s Talari SD-WAN has long boasted, the company claims. In fact, network performance and user experience remain a primary consideration for the company as it enters the SASE space, Tait said.

“A key differentiation is now we can readily and seamlessly integrate with other Oracle products, mainly session border controllers (SBC) or other communications-based equipment," he said. “When it comes to session-level protocol, SASE falls short.”

SBCs provide 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.

Tait explained that the integration of Oracle’s SBC allows Oracle to detect malicious call signatures and get real-time risk assessments for each call.

And on the topic of security, while Oracle is contracting security partners like Check Point, that doesn't mean expanding its security functionality isn't a priority.

“Larry [Ellison] and other executives … they make the broad sweeping claim that we are the most secure cloud — far more secure than any other clouds out there,” Tait said.

And while Tait said Oracle probably won’t be breaking into the firewall market anytime soon, the company is certainly investing heavily in security, particularly around core SASE functionality.

“We are providing a high level of seamless interconnectivity between what goes on in our Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and what we push out to the edge,” Tait said. “Our vision going forward is to expand those products, continue down the security path, become more SASE than we were in the past.”

But for next-generation firewall at the edge, Tait said that Check Point is years ahead of Oracle, and it makes far more sense to partner with the company to address that demand.