AT&T Business released a pair of managed security solutions with Palo Alto Networks.

The carrier updated its burgeoning Dynamic Defense service by integrating Palo Alto’s Prisma Access cloud security capabilities into AT&T’s global network. AT&T pointed to a customer study from Wellby Financial that touted carrier-grade threat intelligence and AI-powered security. Wellby, which is a a small- to mid-sized enterprise (SME) of the sort Dynamic Defense is tailored to, needed a unified security model for what CTO Wes Turner called “simplifying management, and reducing single points of failure.”

With the Dynamic Defense-Palo Alto combo, the firm gained granular access control, zero-trust footing, and improved visibility. A multipathing and redundancy boost was also claimed to be fitting in Wellby’s home market of Houston, which is beset by connectivity issues during severe weather.

“The value of AT&T Dynamic Defense with Palo Alto Networks is its defense-in-depth model, which provides multiple layers of protection across our environment,” Turner said.

AT&T on the edge

Alongside the Dynamic Defense release was the launch of a new secure access service edge (SASE) solution.

AT&T SASE with Palo Alto Networks integrates the latter’s SD-WAN and Prisma Access features through Prisma SASE. AT&T touted a total security service edge (SSE) stack, including zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and software-as-a-service (SaaS). It also boasts post-quantum cryptography (PQC) capabilities that found its way this month into Dynamic Defense for what was dubbed a “quantum-resilient SASE fabric.”

The partnership broadens the Dynamic Defense proposition, which was launched in 2024 to close the SME security gap.

AT&T last year named Palo Alto Networks as a main partner for its Dynamic Defense service, with this week’s announcement seeming to position the solution as a new launch thanks to its new capabilities.

“AT&T was already reselling and managing Palo Alto Networks products, including SASE, SD-WAN, and firewalls," Mauricio Sanchez, senior director for enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group, noted. "So, this is not a new channel relationship."

Sanchez pointed to the refreshed SASE offer as more evolutionary, packaging Prisma SD-WAN and Prisma Access more tightly with AT&T connectivity and managed operations.

"The more important development is the deeper network integration," Sanchez continued. "With Dynamic Defense, Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Access is interconnected directly with AT&T’s private network, moving the offer beyond conventional resale toward network-integrated, comms service provider-delivered security. The milestone is not that AT&T can now sell Palo Alto Networks products. It is that AT&T is embedding Palo Alto Networks security more directly into its connectivity service.”

While AT&T holds ties with Cisco and Fortinet, Palo Alto remains a “leader” according to several Gartner SASE vendor rankings, and counts the likes of T-Mobile US amongst its SASE customer base.

The firm has continued to update its SASE tools, with a recent Prisma SASE 4.0 update tailored to provide continuous, real-time insight into the behavior of SaaS-based AI agents, copilots, and plugins.