Palo Alto Networks Inc. today added more capabilities to its fast-growing Prisma SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) platform by leveraging AI to create what the company calls “a blueprint for the AI-ready enterprise.”
The Secure Access Service Edge service delivers protection against AI-powered threats, data security that adapts to how information flows, and unified operations capable of intelligent scaling. These new features break the mold of “legacy SASE,” which is focused on replacement of traditional wide-area network technology with cloud-first offerings. All the new features in Prisma SASE 4.0 are geared toward enabling companies to protect against AI-driven threats and to safeguard data wherever it resides or moves to.
The innovations of Prisma 4.0 focus on three key areas:
- Deploying SaaS agent security to “safeguard the AI frontier”: Prisma SASE 4.0 provides direct oversight of AI agents. As employees connect tools like Microsoft Copilot to sensitive corporate data, these agents can act autonomously, creating new pathways for data leaks through unvetted prompts or risky plugins. This creates new risks, and the new SaaS Agent Security gives security teams the visibility it needs to see which agents are in use, control data access and block risky activities. AI based innovation is important but can’t be at the cost of putting a business at risk.
- Defending against modern web threats: Prisma Access Browser Advanced Web Security finds and neutralizes malware in real time before it causes any damage. This provides an important layer of defense that most solutions miss. For many organizations, the browser is the desktop and the ability to neutralize attacks that assemble inside the browser can thwart attacks that often bypass traditional security tools.
- Protecting high-value private applications from cyberattacks: Private applications are difficult to security but often the crown jewels of companies. This makes them an ideal target for threat actors. The new Private App Security offering automates the protection of these important applications and continually updates security policies.
For Palo Alto, SASE has been a strong growth engine. On its recent earnings call, Chief Executive Nikesh Arora (pictured) discussed the importance of SASE and its contribution to total contract value and annualized recurring revenue.
“This quarter, we won our largest SASE deal ever, a $60 million contract with a global professional services firm covering nearly 200,000 seats,” he noted. “This was in addition to a record number of eight-figure SASE deals. We’re gaining share. For the last year, we displaced incumbent SASE vendors in over 70 accounts exceeding $200 million in TCV. Our SASE ARR grew 35% year-over-year more than twice as fast as the overall market. We now have over 6,300 SASE customers and account for one-third of the Fortune 500.”
Adding to its portfolio of features in its SASE platform, particularly with AI focused features, will strengthen is offering and make it significantly stickier, making it harder to do to Palo Alto as what it’s currently doing to others.
Using AI to fight AI
Since threat actors have access to the same AI tools as enterprises, it’s an ever-escalating arms race, with the good guys doing all they can to stay ahead of the bad guys. With browser-centric attacks capable of bypassing network controls as attackers use malware designed to take advantage of interactive sessions by weaponizing the domain name systems, Palo Alto is providing enterprises with more powerful tools for the battle.
With Prisma SASE 4.0, Palo Alto is bringing security directly into the user’s experience to stop threats as they appear. The company said the AI-powered Advanced Web Protection in the Prisma Access Browser inspects fully rendered web pages in real time, catching threats that only trigger after page load or user interaction, without requiring transport-layer decryption. This provides markedly better security versus trying to train users to figure out whether a page is legitimate or not.
Other new capabilities include Private Application Security, which consolidates application firewall layers, automatically generating application fingerprints. This enables enterprises to detect anomalies and block botnets, API abuse and unpatched “day zero” exploits without relying on constant manual updates.
In a pre-announcement briefing, Carmine Clementelli, director of SASE product marketing for Palo Alto Networks, highlighted the value of the company’s new AI Agent Security capabilities. “It allows us to provide visibility to all AI agents that are involved,” he said. “Right now, we support Microsoft Copilot Studio and ServiceNow platforms, where all the agents can be deployed. And we provide visibility into all the agents that connect to corporate SaaS applications and their risks and over-permissions. Customers can see all the agents, all their risks, and can help stop unauthorized data access for these agents.”
Modernized data loss prevention
Traditional data loss prevention or DLP approaches, which were designed for structured fields and keyword-based rules, aren’t built to stop unstructured content, for example images, source code or AI-generated text. This creates many blind spots which leads to a flood of false positives.
Prisma SASE 4.0 addresses this with the inclusion of SaaS Security Posture Management, which provides continuous, real-time visibility into the behavior of software-as-a-service-based AI agents, copilots and plugins that now connect directly to corporate data, accelerating productivity but also expanding risk.
The company says the latest version of Prisma SASE continuously discovers and monitors SaaS-based AI agents, giving administrators visibility into which agents are accessing sensitive data, how they are being used and where risks emerge. The guardrails govern user interactions and block unauthorized access, adding to its AI protection. This ensures organizations can adopt AI responsibly without stalling innovation.
Palo Alto says the new capabilities and other key SASE features will be available later this year.
