Forcepoint pinned its future on secure access service edge (SASE) with the launch of two new offerings in the company's Dynamic Edge Protection suite.

"It all starts with the user and how they interact with the applications," said Ravi Srinivasan, VP of solutions and platform marketing at Forcepoint, in an interview with SDxCentral. These applications, he explains can be categorized into two types: software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications running in the cloud, and private applications running in the data center.

Cloud Security Gateway attempts to solve the first scenario by bundling secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, malware detection, and data loss prevention into a single cloud-managed platform. Customers that need additional security can also enable remote browser isolation as an add-on service.

Private Access, on the other hand, enables users to access internal applications in the corporate data center from anywhere without the need for a virtual private network. The service pairs Forcepoint's zero-trust network access platform with its cloud-based firewall-as-a-service.

"This is a unique capability that we've added to our Private Access offering," Srinivasan said. "Unlike all the other private access vendors in the marketplace, we've added it [cloud firewalling] so that we can deliver true zero-trust access control."

Customers that want to extend these capabilities to the branch can also take advantage of an optional, cloud-based SD-WAN platform that's designed to work with existing routing or firewall hardware.

"It's designed for a specific scenario where branch offices don't want to backhaul traffic to the enterprise. They just want to set up their stores, or retail offices, or sites that want to connect directly to the cloud," Srinivasan said.

Srinivasan added that decision was made to make SD-WAN an optional component so that customers with existing WAN deployments could still benefit from Forcepoint's SASE capabilities.

All of these capabilities are deployed across the company's network of 160 global points of presence (PoP), the majority of which run in Forcepoint's private data centers. However, Srinivasan notes that Forcepoint is bolstering its PoP-ulation using Amazon Web Services to provide a truly distributed service.

"It's very highly distributed because it has to be," Srinivasan said. "We deliver services that are not just for performance and security, but we also deliver for localization as well. As a result, we can scale horizontally to add capacity as needed."

In the year since Gartner first defined SASE, the model has quickly gained momentum. SASE adoption has only accelerated in the last six months due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and a shift to remote work.

According to Srinivasan, Forcepoint's offering stands out as it directly addresses users and how they are interacting with data.

"What we've found is the market is quickly getting crowded with a lot of SASE noise," he said. "Nobody's really taking the time to look at the users touching the data, and that the security needs to be in between those interactions to enable that interaction."

However, Forcepoint faces growing competition among more established players like Cato Networks and Palo Alto Networks, which have had a head start in bringing a platform to market, albeit not always with a complete software stack.