Extreme Networks today unveiled its ExtremeCloud Universal zero-trust network access (ZTNA). The vendor already has SD-WAN capabilities and has confirmed to SDxCentral that Extreme Networks is on the path to offering a secure access service edge (SASE) solution.

The Universal ZTNA solution, which will be released in early 2024, is designed to simplify the traditionally complex and fragmented process of managing and securing user access across multiple campuses, branches and remote sites. Its use cases include securing

• IoT devices such as medical devices
• Patient or guest devices on hospital campuses
• Remote users including work-from-anywhere employees accessing work applications for daily tasks

Dan DeBacker, senior VP of product management at Extreme Networks, explains that the solution marries together Extreme Networks’ ZTNA capabilities at the Application level and cloud network access control (NAC) at the device level.

“A lot of our competitors have NAC solutions, have ZTNA solutions, or have both, but they've not actually combined them into a single solution,” DeBacker said. “So if you look at Cisco, Juniper [Networks], [HPE] Aruba, all of those do have those solutions, but there's multiple parts and pieces that make it very difficult.”

“If you go to any one of our competitors, and our customer wants to implement NAC, and they want to implement the ZTNA, they have to buy two products. So that's a cost. They have to license two products, then they have to implement and manage two products in addition to managing their infrastructure,” he added. “That's three different things.”

Extreme Networks already offers a NAC solution called ExtremeControl, but it’s a traditional on-premises-based solution. To meet its customers' demand for a cloud-based access control solution, the vendor decided to roll out this Universal ZTNA, which combines connectivity and security into an identity-based single policy orchestration from the cloud with a single management console, DeBacker said.

Extreme Networks Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Phil Swain emphasizes that the network is no longer a separate piece but a critical part of the security control toolkit. “You want your network to have security capability in and of itself,” he told SDxCentral. “We have the Universal ZTNA to be part of a greater holistic control framework, and that's why it's an obvious next step in network evolutions.”

The vendor touted the benefits of its ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA, including:

• It offers a single solution for establishing and maintaining a consistent security policy while enforcing an identity-level zero-trust policy across the network.
• The Universal ZTNA is offered as a subscription within ExtremeCloud and priced by the number of users across the network, which reduces costs and increases operational efficiency, avoiding the need for multiple licenses and offering scalability.
• The cloud-based solution helps IT teams manage user networks and applications, guests and IoT devices access across various environments. It can be deployed in less than a day with automated onboarding and configuration for all Extreme Universal Platforms.

“In the era of the hyper-distributed Enterprise, users and devices access the Enterprise network from everywhere and rely on Enterprise applications that can be hosted anywhere. As vulnerabilities continue to rise and IoT device growth continues to increase, managing security, performance and scale can be complex,” Brandon Butler, research manager of Enterprise networks at IDC, said in a statement.

“Extreme’s Universal ZTNA aims to provide a simplified, cloud-managed solution for controlling universal network access, using zero-trust principles to help customers meet the network security needs of their distributed digital Enterprise,” Butler added.

This announcement follows Extreme Networks' acquisition of Infovista’s Ipanema SD-WAN division for $73 million in 2021. That acquisition, along with the functionality gained from the purchase of Aerohive in 2019, has strengthened Extreme’s position in the SD-WAN space.

As its competitors such as Cisco, HPE Aruba and Juniper Networks are already making moves to offer single-vendor SASE, DeBacker confirms that Extreme Networks is also on the path to offering SASE, with the first implementation being ZTNA with cloud NAC.

“We're definitely moving down that path. And our first implementation here will be ZTNA with cloud NAC and then we will evolve that solution over time,” he said. “It depends on the definition. I mean, the definition is pretty broad around ZTNA and SASE and security services edge (SSE) [SSE], and all of these types of things. But yes, we actually have a roadmap to continue to add those capabilities and features throughout next year.”

When asked if Extreme Networks plans to rely on partnerships or in-house innovations for SSE and other cloud security capabilities under the SASE platform, DeBacker said, “That’s still TBD [to be determined].”