Orange Business Services and cybersecurity services provider Orange Cyberdefense are partnering with Netskope to deliver a new security services edge (SSE) solution embedded into the Orange Telco Cloud Platform. 

The hybrid architecture embeds Netskope's points-of-presence (POPs) within the Orange network, leveraging Orange Cyberdefense's security with Netskope's global security private cloud footprint and SSE to protect enterprises from data loss and a growing volume of sophisticated threats across cloud, web, and private applications.

“The idea is that we embed the Netskope infrastructure into a secured and controlled network, which gives the customer a user-to-user and a user-to-cloud environment,” Pierre-Marie Binvel, VP of marketing for Orange Business Services' connectivity business unit, told SDxCentral. 

Binvel added the architecture doesn't “take away any of the principles of cloud-based security,” because it has a global and unified consistent security policy from a single console.

The service is available now as a managed service, but Binvel said he expects general availability of the Netskope infrastructure embedded into Orange’s backbone by the end of the first quarter in 2023, with the first proof-of-concept and pilot running by the end of this year.

Dave Rogers, Netskope’s SVP of global alliances and channel sales, said the company has recognized Orange Business Services and Orange Cyberdefence as one of the most influential partners in EMEA for many years. 

“Today, most people are building an offering and asking customers to fit within a defined box that they've created,” Rogers noted. “What you’ve seen from the [Orange Business Services] and [Orange Cyberdefence] teams is different variations of an offering designed to meet people with different sizes, scale of issues.” 

Today’s enterprises are looking for partners that can help accelerate adoption of secure access service edge (SASE) –  Gartner's term for a convergence of networking and security. Rogers claims pairing the Orange network with Netskope's SSE will enable enterprises to be “uniquely situated to help deliver on the true promise of SASE.” 

“I don't see many people that are in that spot today,” he said. “They're usually focused on the network or security.”

To help enterprises solve as many problems as possible, having an infrastructure that works well with all solutions and investments is key. “I think the Orange team provides the umbrella for that in so many different places where we don't, we're not focused, or we have no intentions of building solutions,” Rogers noted.

“Customers don't want to be told what they have to leverage,” he added. “SASE success depends on integrating tools and technologies with the applications and the infrastructure that's already been built.”

Binvel said the partnership came about after an Orange network customer asked the company to Switch their traffic pattern from an existing security supplier to Netskope. 

“To do it overnight, that was not so simple to do on our side,” Binvel explained. He added that use case illustrated how cloud-based security solutions are looked at from a customer standpoint, and raised the question of how Orange can manage its network “more systematically” – bringing together cloud-based security and the network.

Rogers said Netskope has always had the vision that “cloud will bring security and network teams together.” He said that Netskope's pipeline has never been growing faster than what he's seen in the last six months, which he believes is due to the market adjusting to the security needs of SASE adoption.

“We've had a vision that one day, edge — in conjunction with key strategic service provider partners — was going to provide a unique value that the market hadn't seen before,” Rogers added.