Palo Alto Networks Enlists Accenture to Drive SASE Adoption
Palo Alto Networks and Accenture today announced they have extended their alliance to jointly deliver instances of secure access service edge (SASE) services.
Accenture will work with organizations to either set up Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma SASE or completely manage it on their behalf.
Palo Alto Networks has been making a case for a SASE platform delivered via the cloud that makes extensive use of machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence to streamline operations. One of the primary reasons more organizations have not replaced legacy virtual private networks (VPNs) that have known vulnerabilities is because SASE platforms have been historically complicated to provision and manage.
Accenture is now pledging to remove that obstacle to adoption by assuming more responsibility for managing Prisma SASE as part of a larger effort to enable organizations to implement zero-trust IT policies.
Specifically, Accenture is making available SASE Diagnostic and Advisory Services to provide assessments and recommendations, implementation services and a managed service that adds a managed wide area network service to the core Prisma SASE platform.
Prem Iyer, senior vice president of ecosystems for Palo Alto Networks, said as more organizations look to secure the distributed attack surfaces that have become more prevalent thanks to remote work and the rise of edge computing, many of them are realizing they lack the expertise to secure those IT environments on their own.
At the same time, vendors such as Palo Alto Networks are in a better position to collect the amount of telemetry data required to train and then effectively deploy AI models, he noted.
There is no doubt organizations will be relying more on AI to increase overall cybersecurity resiliency and remediate vulnerabilities faster. The overall goal is not to replace chronically short-staffed cybersecurity teams, but rather to augment them with capabilities that automate many of the rote tasks that conspire to make working in cybersecurity tedious. AI technologies should enable cybersecurity teams to mitigate attacks that are increasing in sophistication as cybercriminals themselves begin to experiment with AI. In effect, organizations are now locked in a cybersecurity arms race, like it or not.
It’s too early to predict who will win that arms race, but Palo Alto Networks is betting the overall state of cybersecurity is about to dramatically improve. The company is arguing that the current playing field decidedly favors cybercriminals, so organizations armed with AI capabilities will be better able to defend themselves.
Cybersecurity teams will, of course, need to reevaluate their roles and functions in the months ahead as AI becomes more pervasive. On the plus side, however, the level of burnout in cybersecurity organizations should decrease as, theoretically, the number of false alarms that cybersecurity teams wind up investigating declines. Once algorithms have been trained and, with the rise of generative AI, it becomes easier to tune cybersecurity policies. In the meantime, however, cybersecurity teams need to assume that their adversaries are already determining how AI might also impact their tactics and techniques and make them more effective.
