Palo Alto Networks today announced that it has integrated artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) into its secure access service edge (SASE). The company says the move further solidifies its AI-centered SASE strategy. Meanwhile, the vendor added new SD-WAN capabilities to secure the IoT and automate branch management.

“We are now leveraging AIOps to actually automate the entire IT experience management process, which was largely manual and reactive,” Karan Nigam, senior director of product marketing at Palo Alto Networks, told SDxCentral.

Prisma SASE's existing autonomous digital experience management (ADEM) service provides observability across the network, but IT and network operations center (NOC) teams still have to manually correlate, analyze, and prioritize the alerts and data, he explained.

With AIOps, ADEM can proactively remediate issues and quickly identify network anomalies from a single dashboard, Palo Alto Networks claims.

“Intelligence does the heavy lifting for you. And you're just able to get a very quick overview of what the issues are, sometimes before they even happen, because you're seeing network anomalies here and there. So that's how we are leveraging AI,” Nigam said.

AI-Powered SD-WAN for Branch Management

Palo Alto Networks has also brought AIOps to branch management, adding a Command Center dashboard to its Prisma SD-WAN that provides AI-driven insights along with network and application experience and health monitoring.

“ADEM is the underlying technology that now integrates with SD-WAN devices,” Nigam noted.

“In the past, we could provide you visibility to your networks held on SD-WAN in all the branch offices with SD-WAN dashboard,” he added. “Now because we are using AI, ML [machine learning] in the back end, we are basically just making that a lot more rich, so we are able to get a very quick proactive view of the branch health, etc.”

Additionally, for existing Prisma SD-WAN customers, Palo Alto Networks enables the appliances to help secure IoT devices in their networks, so customers can apply security policies using Prisma Access to all of their IoT devices without having to deploy or buy additional appliances and sensors, Nigam noted.

Palo Alto Networks Offers SASE-Based SWG With Phishing Detections

The company has recently seen three emerging phishing attack trends, including the use of legitimate software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, attacking the proxy, and easily accessible phishing kits with AI and ML capabilities, according to Nigam.

To address this, Palo Alto Networks added agent-based proxy support and phishing-detection capabilities to its Prisma Access Cloud Cloud Secure Web Gateway (SWG).

“We are utilizing our existing AI [and] ML capabilities to do a deeper analysis of the content to be able to prevent some of these sophisticated attacks,” Nigam said.

“The approach we have now is that SASE solutions have to be absolutely AI-driven,” he concluded. “Because, one, that's what will allow you to deliver better security outcomes, [and] the reality is your attackers and adversaries are using AI [and] ML to deploy attacks.”

“Second is as the organizations are getting more distributed and complex, utilization of AI to provide proactive insights, proactive playbooks to IT to be able to manage the complexity and the health of the network is going to become big,” Nigam added.