Stellar Cyber is partnering with
Cato Networks to give enterprises and MSSPs greater visibility into their entire environment – from the edge to the cloud – and the tools to detect and respond to threats.
This week, Stellar Cyber is pairing its SecOps platform that’s built for MSSPs and corporate security teams with Cato’s SASE platform, which converges security with networking, a move that dovetails with the trend toward consolidating security capabilities onto tightly integrated platforms and recognizes the increasingly distributed nature of enterprise environments.
“Customers need better threat visibility, and they need security ISVs to collaborate with technical turnkey integrations, which is exactly what Stellar Cyber and Cato have delivered,”
Andrew Homer, vice president of strategic alliance at Stellar Cyber, told MSSP Alert. “This is the practical version of consolidation: less noise, more visibility, and dramatically faster threat resolution. By unifying Cato’s zero-trust SASE fabric with Stellar Cyber’s AI-powered SecOps platform, we collapse the gap between the edge and the SOC.”
Homer added that “identity, user behavior, and network context flow into our platform in real time, and our AI turns that into high-quality detections and faster response.”
The Distributed Nature of IT
SASE (secure access service edge) – and its cousin, SSE, or security service edge – emerged as the enterprise environment became increasingly distributed as cloud adoption expanded and a workforces became more remote, negating the effectiveness of perimeter-based security.
What’s needed now is greater threat visibility, both in the identity and network context, as organizations embrace zero trust security sensibilities, where people and devices need to be verified before being allowed to access networks and applications.
“Zero trust is built on knowing who the user is and what they are accessing,” Homer said. “By pairing Cato’s zero trust SASE platform with Stellar Cyber’s AI-driven SecOps layer, we’re unifying identity, access, and traffic insights into one continuous detection and response workflow. ... SASE and SecOps convergence is the future.”
The Need for Security Platforms
Other security vendors are moving in that direction. For example,
Fortinet’s SASE platform – which includes features like zero trust network access and a secure web gateway – works tightly with the vendor’s SecOps offering, which includes SIEM (security information and event management), SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response), and EDR (endpoint detection and response).
Homer said what Stellar Cyber and Cato are offering differentiates from options like Fortinet’s, which are done within the confines of the vendor’s portfolio rather than through partnerships, which he said limits customer choice. The Stellar Cyber and Cato partnership is open and interoperable, and is optimized for MSSPs, he added.
“Where our partnership shines is where single-vendor stacks simply fall short,” Homer said. “Closed platforms give partial visibility and lock in customers. Cato-plus-Stellar Cyber gives customer interoperability across identity, network, and behavior in one AI-driven SecOps engine. That’s the difference.”
Others are Partnering
Others are turning toward partnerships.
Zscaler in October said it is
integrating its Zero Trust Exchange with
HCLTech’s AI For and AI Foundry in a push to address the demand for AI-driven security and network transformation by blending automation and zero trust.
In a blog post earlier this year,
Satish Madiraju, senior director of product management at Zscaler, and
Apoorva Ravikrishnan, senior manager of product marketing, wrote about the
need to converge NetOps with SecOps.
“In the face of today’s increasingly sophisticated threat landscape, the traditional separation of these two critical functions is no longer sustainable as attackers exploit vulnerabilities across complex infrastructure,” the two wrote. “Modern organizations need to foster greater collaboration between NetOps and SecOps by adopting a shared culture, shared objectives, and integrated technologies.”
A Single Service for Unified Visibility
The benefits include unified visibility from the edge to the security operations center (SOC), with Cato’s SASE telemetry being fed into Stellar Cyber’s platform. The AI-powered capabilities of both vendors are available to security teams and MSSPs, and the combination improves detection of lateral movement through the network and misuse of access.
For MSSPs, they can offer clients identity and network visibility in a
unified service, with the partnership delivering multi-tenant management, faster onboarding, and automation that reduces costs and eases staffing challenges and eliminates “large chunks of operational overhead, everything from stitching together feeds to rebuilding identity-to-traffic evidence during investigations,” Homer said.
“MSSPs want a unified service, an integrated solution at a low TCO, not a pile of loosely connected tools,” he said. “Cato provides the global SASE backbone, Stellar Cyber provides the AI-driven SecOps layer that turns that data into case-centric detections, triage, and response across all client tenants.”
