The new Dynamic Edge Protection Suite consists of two solutions, which bundles long-standing offerings into converged ones which are delivered as a service that are easy to administer and easy for home users to set up securely.

Today, cybersecurity vendor Forcepoint is launching their new Dynamic Edge Protection suite of cloud-native SASE [Secure Access Service Edge] solutions. The suite is compromised of two solutions, Cloud Security Gateway and Private Access. Both of them take solutions which have been around for years, converge them, and deliver them as a service that is easy to set up and consume, and so is highly applicable to Work From Home environments.

“We are pretty excited about changing the game here,” said Ravi Srinivasan, Forcepoint’s VP, Solutions and Platform Marketing. “We are introducing two organically developed products. Cloud Security Gateway provides converged   Secure Web Gateway, CASB [Cloud Access Security Broker] and built-in Data Loss Prevention as a service. It’s all delivered as a single product, as a centrally managed service.”

The second offering within the Dynamic Edge Protection suite is Private Access,  a cloud service which provides zero-trust remote access to internal applications without VPNs.

“Forcepoint Private Access is also a brand new product,” Srinivasan said. “In order to access a company’s internal applications like SAP HANA or Tableau, you have needed to have a VPN access. Private Access provides the same user access to internal applications, without needing a VPN.”

SASE was defined by Gartner, and is one of their newer Magic Quadrants.

“SASE is an architectural principle to take the old stack of security, converge them into bite-sized services, and deliver them in the cloud as service,” Srinivasan said. “The other element to it is the convergence. Historically, customers have bought point products and built out a stack. Each of these functionalities  has been implemented as individual products. We deliver them with SASE as converged capabilities – with only one proxy, and one place to inspect the traffic and get validated for threat protection and connectivity.”

Srinivasan said that partners as well as customers want these converged solutions instead of having more things to manage.

“The security space has been very crowed with lots of point tools,” he stated. “We have seen a lot of excitement in our partner base for these converged solutions. Partners don’t want to deal with multiple point vendors – they are resource starved as well. They want to work with one vendor to use SASE to reach their customer base. They can sell more of their products at a lower TCO for the customer. Customers see a 30% reduction by acquiring this instead point security CASB and DLP products. For partners, it’s a conversation started to introduce cloud security gateway into the conversation. We are seeing interest at both distributor and channel partner level as a result.”

Srinivasan emphasized that the two Forcepoint SASE solutions aren’t designed to rip and replace older solutions.

“The cloud services are designed to work with customers’ existing solutions,” he said. “If they have SD-WAN, that’s fine. We route it to us to provide our SASE functionality, and provide our own value add as inline data protection as a service. Over time, they can retire their old hardware and software and virtual appliances. That’s the architectural design of the product.

“A lot of the platform security service providers are working to this objective – letting customers work with their existing investments,” Srinivasan added. “But we are launching this ahead of our competitors.”

The Dynamic Edge Protection suite has also been designed to meet the needs of the Work From Home market that has increased the demand for it.

“The pandemic is an accelerator of adoption for these solutions,” Srinivasan said.  “Security leaders and network admins have always gone remote. Now, they want to try it as a service.  It’s not just for remote working today, but it’s the new way of working as we come out of the pandemic, where people will be looking for more distributed solutions, which allows that new way of working and safeguarding data wherever it is used.

“We have designed these with a very simplified interface,” Srinivasan continued. “A home user can enable this with the click of a button. They can quickly enable the endpoint through a simple one-step process. They get an email, install an agent, and connect to our cloud with one click.”

Admins also can see both solutions through the same interface.

“They get to see the policy access to products in one pane of glass,” Srinivasan said. “Before they would set it all up in one product – then another product – so they would get blind spots. Now they see users’ policies set up for both.”

Looking ahead, the roadmap for the suite will involve adding more capabilities to the existing Cloud Security Gateway and Private Access solutions, rather than adding more solutions.

The roadmap will build on these two products, adding more functionality to them,” Srinivasan said. “These are the control points for the customer.”

Customer pricing for an annual subscription to Cloud Security Gateway costs $USD 99 per user per year. Private Access costs $79 per user per year.