Windstream Enterprise announced a managed security services edge (SSE) powered by Cato Networks designed to ease the transition to secure access service edge (SASE) for enterprises.

Windstream CTO Art Nichols said the managed service is “meeting customers where they are in their own transformation and their own security and digital transformation journey.”

The managed service includes all of Gartner’s SSE requisites – including firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), secure web gateway (SWG), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and Cloud Access Security Broker – and also includes next-generation anti-malware, managed detection and response, data loss prevention (DLP), and Intrusion Prevention System. The managed SSE builds on DLP services, also provided by Cato Networks, that Windstream Enterprise announced late last year.

Nichols said the volume of Enterprise customers interested in SASE products has grown significantly, but many need to take a piecemeal approach to the transformation due to various factors including existing SD-WAN commitments, cost, and expertise limitations.

“Oftentimes what we see is contractual commitments that prevent, one piece or the other, a customer from moving forward on a technology,” he explained. “We think the end game still results in a full blown SASE solution for a large segment of customers. So this is really just an incremental way to make progress toward that destination.”

Chris Alberding, senior director of SD-WAN and security at Windstream, noted a benefit of the SSE service is it can be used in tandem with existing network deployments as enterprises wait these SD-WAN contracts out. Once contracts expire, many will look for SD-WAN options that are already integrated with a SSE solution for an integrated, full-stack SASE product, Alberding noted.

“It really gives the customers the ability to immediately leverage the cutting edge security solution without having to do a network forklift. It's a great opportunity to establish a baseline and then evolve that customer over time to a SASE path,” he said.

SASE and SSE have spread through the market quickly, Alberding said, and despite interest in SASE snowballing, the term is still just a buzzword for many enterprises who don’t quite understand how to transition to the cloud-based network security framework.

“There's a percentage of the customers, the real large Enterprise with sophisticated IoT stuff, so they've invested in exploring [SASE], they're familiar,” he said. “But the average everyday customer, no they don’t understand how to approach it.”

For overwhelmed enterprises that have had to reduce budget, staff, or don’t have the necessary talent to assess their current network and security stacks or plan and deploy new SASE technologies, Alberding said it falls upon Windstream and other service providers to educate and manage their SASE transformation journeys.

“We are a 12 year senior security organization that can be the intelligence for the customer and the staff to help not only design but deploy and then ultimately maintain and manage solutions,” he said. “That's where I think we can really provide that extra value beyond just the technology.”