Networking and security vendor Cato today announced a partnership with Japan-based service provider KDDI to deliver its secure access service edge (SASE) platform to customers across North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. The announcement marks Cato’s first telecom service provider partnership.

“Our customers are searching for a solution to enable their people to work from home, but they have major concerns about the security of such solutions,” said Toru Maruta, executive officer and head of product management for KDDI’s solution business division, in a statement.

Cato was among the first software vendors to embrace the SASE sigil after Gartner Research analysts coined the phrase in 2019. Since then the market has exploded, due in part to the global pandemic and resulting tidal shift to remote work.

SASE platforms — Cato’s included — feature a wide swath of SD-WAN, networking, and security capabilities in a tightly integrated cloud-native package. Many of these services are distributed across geographic points of presence.

From a security standpoint, Cato’s SASE offering includes a next-generation firewall, secure web gateway, threat prevention, and a managed threat detection and response service.

Much of SASE’s appeal in the wake of the pandemic has been centered around the issue of remote access. Cato’s platform features software-defined perimeter and zero-trust network access capabilities to address these challenges.

Finally, Cato’s platform has dedicated cloud on-ramps for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and other cloud data centers without requiring any additional configuration or specialized hardware, the vendor claims. This allows the company to provide optimized access to software-as-a-service applications by routing traffic across Cato’s backbone to the doorstep of the application data center or colocation.

“The beauty of Cato Cloud is that it doesn’t just provide connectivity, it also provides the security features that enterprise customers demand,” Maruta said, in a statement.