AT&T is riding Palo Alto Networks upmarket as it looks to expand the scale and scope of its cybersecurity focused Dynamic Defense service.

AT&T launched its Dynamic Defense platform last year, which is a network-based cybersecurity service targeted at small- and mid-sized enterprises. The service offers malicious IP address blocking, next-generation firewall (NGFX) capabilities, and other advanced security features without the additional cost of installation and equipment.

More importantly, it ties together AT&T’s various networking platforms, including fiber-based wired and wireless to remove the networking complexity from deployments. Senthil Ramakrishnan, AVP of cybersecurity technology at AT&T, explained this has allowed customers to get the platform up and running in as little as 16 minutes.

Ramakrishnan noted that the initial Dynamic Defense product acted as a cloud-based firewall for mid-market deployments, but “once you go upper market, it's multiple layers. … Dynamic Defense became a layer, but it became apparent that we need to have more tech, more advanced security tech as part of the stack as well.”

“As you start going up market, into enterprise, public sector, even our partner, indirect channels, it became very important that they have a much larger set of security requirements and capabilities, even if we're looking at just the network security area alone,” Ramakrishnan said.

Those security requirements include secure service edge (SSE) and secure access service edge (SASE) platforms that “became a lot more common even at the upper end of the mid-market where we’re seeing a lot of customers making that transition from pure [on-premises] solutions into more cloud-based security solutions,” Ramakrishnan added.

The technology includes all the cybersecurity acronyms: secure web gateway (SWG), cloud-access security broker (CASB), and zero-trust network access (ZTNA). “We had the choice of either building our own or looking to partner with someone like [Palo Alto Networks],” Ramakrishnan said.

Enter the deftly named AT&T Dynamic Defense with Palo Alto Networks.

Ramakrishnan explained that the deployment routes traffic first into AT&T’s Dynamic Defense base. Customers that sign up for the Palo Alto Networks components then have that traffic fed via direct connect into the vendor’s cloud. “The network is extended into [Palo Alto Networks’] cloud rather than bringing [the Palo Alto Networks’] cloud into the network,” Ramakrishnan said.

Ramakrishnan also pointed to plans for a co-branded secure browser that will use Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Access Browser and AT&T’s connectivity to power an enterprise browser for any device or from any location. “Those are the things that many of the other vendors did not have as part of their roadmap,” Ramakrishnan said. “That made a huge difference.”

The integration was also eased by AT&T’s more than a decade worth of effort in virtualizing its network core. This has allowed the operator to more easily tap new services into that core.

“My team wouldn’t exist if all that work hadn’t happened,” Ramakrishnan said.

AT&T floats through the acronym soup

The partnership route makes sense. Analysts have noted that SSE is what is driving SASE innovation, and that SSE strength is coming from cybersecurity firms and not networking companies.

“I think people realize that trying to treat these separately as has been done in the past doesn't lead or it's very hard or possible to get to the end result, which is a much more secure WAN-branch network,” Mauricio Sanchez, senior director for enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group, told SDxCentral in an interview. “I don't want to minimize [networking], I think that's still part-and-parcel to why people are leaving access routing … so we shouldn't minimize that piece. But I think what the higher strategic goal here is let's embrace this and do the total transformation because it'll get us a better security outcome, and along with it get to a better networking outcome.”

The choice of Palo Alto Networks also makes sense. The vendor is ranked by many analyst firms as a leading provider of that cybersecurity acronym soup to the enterprise space. Its depth of offerings also allows AT&T to provide a single-vendor SASE platform that analysts predict will drive the broader market.

Gartner last year predicted that 65% of new SD-WAN purchases by 2027 will be part of a single-vendor SASE offering, a significant rise from the 20% it expected in 2024. Gartner said the client interest in single-vendor SASE has more than doubled compared to the previous year and it estimates there are more than 10,000 organizations using a vendor’s primary single-vendor SASE offering.

“The market for well-architected single-vendor SASE offerings is dynamic and maturing, and SASE interest among our clients has been growing rapidly,” Gartner noted in its SASE Magic Quadrant report.

AT&T for now is focusing its efforts with Palo Alto Networks.

“It's such a strategic partnership, and the integration is a lot deeper, not just at the tech stack, but also at the sales stack, at the support stack, there's a lot of stuff going on and we don't want to muddy it too much by adding multiple vendors,” Ramakrishnan said, adding that there are always different integration challenges with different vendors that can take away focus, so AT&T is planning to stay focused on Palo Alto Networks “for at least a few years.”

“At the end of the day, it's an outcome for the customer,” Ramakrishnan said. “Independent of what's powering it, the customer was like, ‘as long as I can get to this outcome, I'm just happy. And if that outcome comes with a very large leader, like AT&T and [Palo Alto Networks] together, then that's even better for us.’”