Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will acquire Axis Security to build out a secure access service edge (SASE) and meet increasing demand for VPN replacements and integrated networking and security.

Axis Security’s cloud-native security services edge (SSE) (SSE) platform, Atmos, includes zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker, and digital experience monitoring (DEM). The Atmos technology was already integrated with HPE's Aruba SD-WAN prior to the acquisition announcement, and full SASE stack availability “will happen pretty quickly,” Aruba Chief Security Officer Jon Green said.

The Axis Security acquisition comes days after HPE announced it acquired private cellular technology provider Athonet, which will bolster Aruba’s private networking portfolio with 5G mobility and coverage. Aruba eventually plans to extend the new SASE portfolio to these cellular networks, according to Green.

HPE's stock climbed more than 6% in extended trading this week after the acquisitions and earnings for its fiscal first quarter were announced. CEO Antonio Neri in a live interview said the first-quarter performance was “record-setting” for the company.

Green said that Aruba will enable a “plug and play” disaggregated SASE approach, allowing Enterprise customers to choose whether they procure their networking and security stacks from separate vendors or from Aruba alone.

“You certainly won't see us forcing a customer down a path of saying you have to buy this all from Aruba or nothing's going to work,” Green told SDxCentral, adding that the vendor plans to actively maintain its SD-WAN integration opportunities with pure-play SSE providers, such as Zscaler.

Green believes the third-party interoperability Aruba will offer for its SASE product will be a key differentiator against vendors like Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks – all of which he pointed out are just as much partners as they are competitors. Green suspects SSE partners like Zscaler are working on adding SD-WAN to their portfolios as well, and will soon “come at the same market, but they're going to be coming at it from the other direction.”

“Even though we're going to have a competitive solution, customers really appreciate having the technical integration that we've done with [other providers] and we're going to keep that up. That's the world we're in. We're all frenemies,” he said. “We'll be friendly to whoever you want us to bring in and that's gonna be one area of strength, stitching [separate technologies] together really effectively.”

Green said the primary use-case for Aruba customers pursuing SASE will be using the portfolio's ZTNA capabilities as a VPN replacement.  ZTNA provides network connectivity through a Proxy in the cloud, and enterprises will be able to take further advantage of that with other SASE tools like SWG and CASB – services that become possible when you have TLS proxies in the cloud, he explained.

“We kind of realized VPN is decreasing in popularity as more people are outside and services are split between the Internet and on-premise data centers,” Green added. “So we had to do something different and ZTNA was kind of the answer to that.”

After Aruba’s four-year search for an SSE acquisition, Axis was the ideal candidate because the vendor’s portfolio was built around ZTNA, and the company was quick to add other security capabilities, Green said. The Axis technology being younger than most on the market means it is also built for multicloud and capable of handling bare metal.

“That's interesting to us from the perspective of taking that bare metal, putting it on HPE hardware and putting it inside a customer's data center. Now you can see ZTNA is not just for users out on the Internet trying to access private data center applications. It can be for everyone,” he added.

Aruba already provides IT infrastructure in the form of servers and storage, which Green said will enable ZTNA for local data center access, and “even making that available as-a-service as part of HPE Greenlake.”