SonicWall buys up SSE startup to accelerate SASE offerings
SonicWall has acquired Banyan Security, a secure service edge (SSE) vendor, in a bid to round out the secure access service edge (SASE) offerings on its cloud security platform with fresh zero trust security components,.
The acquisition will help small businesses looking to replace legacy architectures with security service edge (SSE) solutions, particularly zero trust network access (ZTNA), the company said in a news release.
“With the rise of cloud computing and SASE, the industry is shifting its focus to more comprehensive and flexible approaches that include SSE and ZTNA as a necessity,” said Bob Vankirk, president and chief executive officer of Sonicwall, in the release. “Together, SonicWall and Banyan Security will provide cloud-based secure access service edge (SASE) solutions that empower partners to deliver a security architecture for any stage of their customers’ evolving cloud journey.”
The zero-trust framework is designed to secure an organization’s edges in hybrid work environments. The framework employs a principle of “never trust, always verify” as against the legacy perimeter-based security approach which assumes users are trustable once they are inside the network.
Back in 2020 SonicWall partnered with Perimeter 81 on a ZTNA offering, Cloud Edge Secure Access, which operates a least-privilege security model to prevent unauthorized users from accessing and moving through the network and gives trusted users only access to what they need. However, Perimeter 81’s $490 million acquisition last August by Check Point Software Technologies, a competitor to SonicWall, may have pushed the company to search for a solution more under its control.
Device-centric ZTNA
The acquisition of Banyan will give SonicWall in a device-centric ZTNA that will factor in the device ID, device security posture and resource sensitivity before giving limited access to resources in accordance with an additional least-privilege layering.
