SASE from Masergy: Best-of-breed technologies, broad choices, and security that goes beyond SASE

If you’re looking for a high-performance SD-WAN service that comes with the broadest choice of security solutions from the most trusted name brands in security, look no further than Masergy’s SASE offering.

A new category of solutions called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is converging SD-WAN and a swath of security tools into one cloud service from one provider, and Masergy’s latest news announcement reveals the service enhancements that are positioning our company to compete in this emerging market. Here’s a quick look at Masergy’s approach to SASE, the updates we have made, and how we’re leaning into the five core capabilities of SASE, which include:

1. Firewall as a Service (FWaaS)
2. Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
3. Secure Edge Gateway (SWG)
4. SD-WAN
5. Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)

Proactive convergence: Masergy’s SASE competitive advantage

Before we dig in, it’s important to note a bit of history. Convergence is a concept that is all too familiar to Masergy. For years, we have worked to ensure security is intrinsic to our network services. As a firm believer in the notion that one strategy, one solution, and one dashboard should address both IT domains, we’ve been embedding security tools into our network and cloud platform all along. This has given us a running start at the SASE model. With some back-end tweaks, we’ve already solidified our SASE offering. Here’s what we have done and where we’re going next.

5 SASE capabilities: How Masergy delivers and differentiates itself

Firewall as a service

What’s New: Masergy’s Cloud Firewalls, powered by Fortinet, are expanding to every point of presence (POP) within Masergy’s software-defined network. We’ve integrated Fortinet’s FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls at all locations to enable clients with fully managed firewall services all across the globe.

How our Cloud Firewall is differentiated:

• Best-of-breed technology: Masergy’s SASE approach is unique because it converges best-of-breed technologies from leaders in their respective Gartner Magic Quadrants. For next-gen cloud firewalls, we use technology from Fortinet, a Leader in Gartner, Inc.’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls¹ report.
• Hybrid Firewalls: Masergy provides hybrid options with the ability to put firewalls in the cloud and at the network edge. While the SASE market is still rapidly evolving, this flexibility is unique and purposely designed to serve enterprises that still prefer on-premise firewall appliances when performance, user experience, and total cost of ownership are key goals.

Learn more about Masergy’s Cloud Firewall solution

CASB

What’s New: Masergy deepened its partnership with Forcepoint, our CASB technology partner, tightly integrating their solution into our software-defined network and cloud platform. This enhancement reduces IT complexity, giving clients the seamless, unified service experience that SASE buyers are looking for.

How our CASB is differentiated:

• Best-of-breed technology: Giving clients more trusted name-brand technology, Forcepoint is a recognized Leader in Gartner, Inc.’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)² report.
• CASB with managed detection and response: Masergy’s turnkey CASB services are managed 24/7 by Masergy security analysts in global security operations centers strategically located in North America, Europe, and Asia.
• More options: CASB can be deployed as part of our SASE solutions, our SD-WAN solutions, as part of a package of managed security solutions, or even as a standalone solution.

Learn more about Masergy’s CASB solution

Secure Web Gateway

What’s New: Masergy has standardized its cloud platform around Fortinet’s best-in-class secure web gateway (SWG) solution, giving clients the advantage of more SASE capabilities from trusted brands.

How our SWG is differentiated:

• Best-of-breed technology: Fortinet is named a Leader in Gartner Inc.’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure³ report.
• Protection everywhere: Fortinet firewalls protect network traffic at a packet level, and the FortiGate SWG protects IP traffic at an application level—both in the cloud and on-premise.
• More visibility: Cloud-based application control and content filters include granular per-app and per-user visibility with Masergy’s Identity-Based WAN Analytics.

Learn more about Masergy’s Secure Web Gateway solution

SD-WAN

What’s New: In October, Masergy launched it’s Work from Anywhere solutions, which include SD-WAN at Home and SD-WAN Secure Remote Access. This means IT leaders can extend all the benefits of their SASE solution and SD-WAN services to their remote workforce–no matter where they are.

How our SD-WAN is differentiated:

• Unrivaled cloud application performance: With the industry’s most competitive service level agreements, Masergy’s network and cloud platform consistently delivers less than 1 millisecond of jitter.
• AI + SD-WAN: Masergy’s AIOps solution acts as a 24/7 virtual assistant, evaluating the network, identifying issues, and helping IT teams optimize performance.
• Experience in unified platforms: Masergy began pioneering SD-networking platforms 20 years ago, and we use our global SD-network as the standard operating system to converge SASE technologies and capabilities. This agile infrastructure is our secret to bringing “all things IT” into one platform where everything interoperates.

Learn more about Masergy’s SD-WAN Secure solutions

Zero Trust Network Access

Masergy is on an aggressive path to build out Zero Trust Network Access capabilities with a near-term roadmap that includes single sign on (SSO), authentication, and authorization based on user, device, and location, which enforces highly granular access controls on a need-to-have basis. Rest assured that we will continue to incorporate technologies from leaders in the security industry and seamlessly build in comprehensive services that take more burden off clients’ IT teams.

Summarizing Masergy’s SASE differentiators

There’s so much packed into Masergy’s SASE offering that it can be difficult to keep it short and snappy. We like to summarize it all with these key points:

• Best-of-breed technologies from Gartner Magic Quadrant leaders
• The broadest choices in security with unique, hybrid firewall options
• Security services that reach beyond the five core capabilities of SASE

Along with our press release, Masergy has launched a new package of SASE resources. Don’t miss them!

• White Paper by ZK Research: SASE Buyer’s Guide
• Website Resources: Explore Masergy’s SASE offering
• Press Release: Masergy Strengthens Its SD-WAN Secure Solution with Deeper SASE Capabilities

Article Series: SASE Straight Talk – Get the real story

• How do you tease out the differences in SASE solutions?
• Is there more than one way to SASE?
• Can I skip SD-WAN and jump straight to SASE?
• Why are there so many different interpretations of SASE?
• Is SASE real or just a concept?
• What are the benefits of SASE?
• What lies beyond SASE?

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¹ Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls by Rajpreet Kaur, Adam Hils, Jeremy D’Hoinne. November 9, 2020.
² Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers by Craig Lawson, Steve Riley. October 28, 2020.
³ Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure by Jonathan Forest, Andrew Lerner, Naresh Singh. September 23, 2020.

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