Palo Alto Networks announced new capabilities to boost its single-vendor SASE solution enabling organizations to automate their increasingly complex IT and network operations center (NOC) functions.

Additionally, the company announced features to secure IoT and automate branch management. With new AI-powered capabilities, organizations can confidently rely on Prisma® SASE to generate better security outcomes and unlock operational efficiencies.

"With so many organizations adopting SASE, it is important to understand that in order to reap the full benefits, they need to move towards a single-vendor SASE approach. A mix-and-match approach increases complexity and makes it challenging to be proactive or isolate issues," said Kumar Ramachandran, senior vice president for Products, SASE. "With an integrated Prisma SASE, organizations can harness the power of AI across networking and security to enable a great user experience."

Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) provides Prisma SASE customers end-to-end observability across their network to enable a great user experience. Now with the addition of AIOps, ADEM will help customers automate complex IT and NOC functions while increasing productivity and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). Since ADEM is integrated within Prisma SASE it does not require additional appliances or agents to be deployed.

The benefits that AIOps for ADEM can deliver include:

- Proactively remediate issues that can cause service interruption through AI-based problem detection and predictive analytics.

- Isolate issues faster (reduced MTTR) through an easy-to-use query interface.

- Simply and quickly discover network anomalies from a single dashboard.

Branch locations have never been as digitized and hyper-connected as they are today. The strength of SASE is that it converges SD-WAN with a cloud-delivered Secure Service Edge (SSE), helping organizations simplify management, get consistent visibility and leverage AI/ML for smarter decision-making.

Palo Alto Networks is introducing three SD-WAN innovations:

- Prisma SD-WAN Command Center provides AI-powered and segment-wise insights and always-on monitoring for network and apps for proactive problem resolution at the branch level. With a comprehensive Command Center dashboard, IT gets visibility into organization-wide application experience and health, enabling expedited root cause analysis.

- Prisma SD-WAN with integrated IoT security allows existing Prisma SD-WAN appliances to help secure IoT devices. This enables accurate detection and identification of branch IoT devices. Customers can now enable robust security controls from within the familiar cloud management for Prisma SASE. Other SD-WAN solutions require additional appliances and sensors to be deployed in the network to gain visibility into IoT devices and prevent threats.

- On-Prem Controller for Prisma SD-WAN helps customers meet their industry-specific security compliance requirements and works with on-prem and cloud controller deployments. Customers can now choose to deploy Prisma SD-WAN using the cloud management console, on-prem controllers or both in a hybrid scenario.

Some organizations with proxy-based architectures that need to meet industry-specific requirements are looking to migrate to a SASE-based cloud secure web gateway (SWG). Palo Alto Networks is introducing agent-based explicit proxy support with Prisma Access to enable such customers to benefit from superior cloud-delivered security without the need for networking changes, even allowing the coexistence with third-party VPN agents.

Additionally, Prisma Access Cloud SWG uses Palo Alto Networks Advanced URL Filtering to provide the industry's only real-time prevention of unknown and highly evasive Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) phishing attacks. Advanced URL Filtering can also help prevent SaaS platform phishing attacks. With the rise in the sophistication and scale of modern web attacks, Prisma Access cloud SWG stays ahead of threat actors to secure customers with its AI/ML-powered detections.

''Organizations are rapidly adopting SASE frameworks, driving innovation for both SD-WAN and SSE. With today's announcements for Prisma SD-WAN, Palo Alto Networks is demonstrating their commitment to innovation, not just in cloud-delivered security, but in a tightly integrated single-vendor SASE solution that includes industry-leading SD-WAN. Enabling customers to secure IoT devices in branch offices and providing end-to-end visibility to determine branch health utilizing the new SD-WAN Command Center will help them differentiate themselves in the mature SD-WAN market,'' said Bob Laliberte, principal analyst of Enterprise Strategy Group.

All new capabilities will be available by May 2023, except the Prisma SD-WAN Command Center, which will be available by July 2023.