Comcast Business and Fortinet are partnering to deliver enterprises a set of secure access service edge (SASE) and security services edge (SSE) solutions designed to better protect distributed workforces using a cloud-delivered approach to security policy enforcement.

The partnership comes on the heels of a study commissioned by Fortinet and Comcast subsidiary Masergy in which 98% of Enterprise IT leaders said the convergence of network and security is critical or very important. Ninety-four percent said their adoption of SASE solutions has accelerated.

“A lot of our customers are struggling with this whole concept of SASE,” Amit Verma, CTO of Enterprise solutions at Comcast, told SDxCentral. “The industry is moving in the direction of converging network and security, so SD-WAN and security, but a lot of our customers still have silos.”

Verma noted that because Comcast already has infrastructure using Fortinet technology, integrating a Fortinet SSE solution is the best approach to building out its “own SASE and SSE flavor.”

“It gives us the flexibility for customers who want to use the Fortinet edge and have an end-to-end SASE solution,” Verma added. “Or for customers who have their own existing SD-WAN, but they want to use the security and multicloud access, to use us for that.”

Nirav Shah, VP of products at Fortinet, explained that one of the biggest capabilities IT leaders now need is security for users working from anywhere, with user experience staying consistent. “That's exactly where Fortinet and Comcast come together, because Fortinet has been doing this networking and security convergence for many years,” he added. 

Shah said one of the most common requests it gets for SASE and SSE architectures is implementing the zero-trust mindset. “What Fortinet and Comcast are doing together is now this zero-trust network access enforcement,” he explained. “So whether deployed in a cloud-delivered fashion, whether you want to deploy it on-prem, Universal ZTNA is there.”

According to Shah, there are few vendors who can provide single-vendor SASE and Fortinet is one of them. “What's unique is this is all organic innovation coming in one Operating System, a unified offering, what we call FortiOS,” he said. “And Comcast has been a user of that system for many years.”

The new Comcast offerings are delivered through Comcast Business Secure Gateways and give enterprises the option to choose from either SASE or SSE solutions backed by Fortinet’s networking technology and the Equinix Fabric cloud connection. The gateways are hosted across the U.S. at Equinix data centers, which gives customers access to the major cloud services providers and more than 200 different Software-as-a-Service providers.

Comcast Business Secure Gateways provide fully hosted SASE or SSE services, including security networking solutions for firewall-as-a-service (FaaS), intrusion prevention, data loss prevention (DLP), cloud access security brokers (Cloud Access Security Broker), and zero-trust network access (ZTNA). 

Enterprises can choose between the Comcast SSE solution, which brings together multiple cloud-delivered network security technologies in a fully hosted environment, and the SASE solution, which provides the hosted SSE security architecture combined with zero-trust capabilities and any of the company's SD-WAN solutions.

If a customer already has an SD-WAN solution with Comcast, Verma said they can simply add on SSE features like ZTNA and CASB. If a customer is looking to migrate from another platform or solution to Comcast for a full SASE implementation, they can do that as well.

“We have been offering the full next-generation firewall service, secure web gateway, CASB, DLP, ZTNA,” Shah said. “But the fact that now those functionalities, Comcast is now putting them in their own data center to deploy in a cloud-delivered fashion, gives users tremendous flexibility. So it's great to see how the industry is evolving.”