Despite the edge’s often nebulous definition, enterprises aren’t waiting around to adopt and secure the fledgling technology, a recent AT&T report concluded.

The report, which surveyed more than 1,500 organizations, explored how enterprises are thinking about edge use cases, what types of networks they are using, and how they plan to secure those investments.

Of those surveyed, 75% said they either planned to, had partially deployed, or had fully implemented an edge deployment use case, according to Theresa Lanowitz, head of cybersecurity evangelism at AT&T. “Edge deployments are much, much further along than anybody possibly thought,” she said in an interview with SDxCentral.

Early edge applications include loss prevention in retail, video-based quality inspection for manufacturing, telemedicine in health care, and surveillance and electronic voting in the public sector.

“This is a new compute paradigm underpinned by 5G and edge technologies,” Lanowitz said. “We’re moving further away from the data center, and we’re moving more to experiences versus traditional IP applications.”

Enterprises’ edge enthusiasm was also undeterred by the clear and present security risks associated with adopting the technology, the report found.

Not only do enterprises believe an attack on edge infrastructure is likely, they also believe any such attack would have a considerable impact on business operations, Lanowitz said, adding that the benefit of this trend is cybersecurity at the edge isn’t an afterthought the same way it was with the cloud.

“In the past, if we think about cybersecurity, it was always tacked on at the end,” she said. “Cybersecurity is really being thought about at the beginning of these edge use cases.”

Enterprises now expect to dedicate between 11% and 21% of their project budget to security, up from just 1% a few years ago, the report found.

Secure access service edge (SASE), a relatively new technology coined by Gartner in 2019, is the obvious choice for addressing edge security concerns, with the exception of small to midsized businesses under 500 employees, according to AT&T.

“One of the very attractive things about SASE is the inclusion of zero trust,” a priority for the vast majority of respondents (94%), Lanowitz said.

And as enterprises look to capitalize on new edge use cases, many are turning to managed service providers — like AT&T Cybersecurity — for help managing the complexity of these deployments.

AT&T was among the first communications service providers to announce managed SASE services beginning with Fortinet in early 2021. The carrier has since expanded to include managed SASE from Palo Alto Networks and Cisco.

“We know that complexity is increasing, and it’s never going back to the way it was before,” Lanowitz said,

Roughly 65% of respondents with active edge deployments said they were working with a service provider to manage and secure them.

“It’s becoming more complex, it’s becoming more difficult, and they want to work with somebody who has done this before and who has seen these types of use cases before,” she said, adding that cybercriminals are determined and will strike anywhere they see an opening.

While SASE’s cloud-based security capabilities make it an attractive option for edge security, respondents also see an ongoing need for SD-WAN for at least the next three years, she added. What’s more, AT&T found that while enterprises are enthusiastic about the edge, they have no plans to eliminate their existing data center and cloud infrastructure.

“Architectures for edge networks and security controls continue to be deployed in hybrid environments,” Lanowitz said. “It was a 50/50 split across our respondents.”