GTT Communications this week extended its alliance with Palo Alto Networks to include an additional managed secure access service edge (SASE) offering.

Darren Wolner, vice president of product management for GTT Communications, said this addition to the company’s Secure Connect portfolio provides another SASE option that the managed service provider (MSP) can deploy and maintain on behalf of customers.

Included as part of that offering are a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), a firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) offering, a secure web gateway (SWG), a cloud access secure broker (CASB) and a zero-trust network access (ZTNA) framework.

Additionally, GTT provides Envision DX, a set of services for deploying cybersecurity tools and platforms that are designed to optimize customer experiences, said Wolner.

GTT has previously supported multiple cybersecurity platforms from Palo Alto Networks and is now extending the reach of those offerings to include a SASE platform designed to enforce zero-trust policies across distributed computing environments that, as they expand, continue to increase the overall size of the attack surface that needs to be defended, said Wolner.

It’s not clear how many organizations are adopting SASE platforms, but a recent survey conducted by The Futurum Group finds cybersecurity teams are prioritizing network security automation (55%) and network detection and response (51%), followed by network segmentation and microsegmentation (49%), zero-trust network access (43%) and cloud network security controls (28%).

The primary challenges in endpoint security revolve around balancing security and productivity (37%) and ensuring effective integration with network and cloud security (34%), followed by securing remote/unmanaged devices (32%), improving user experience (32%), managing diverse endpoint types (29%), responding quickly to advanced threats (29%) and managing legacy systems (27%).

The issue that many of these organizations are now confronting is that as cybersecurity continues to become more complex to manage, the level of expertise required continues to increase. Unfortunately, the pool of cybersecurity expertise needed to manage all the tools and platforms required has not kept pace, so in many instances, more organizations are opting to rely more on managed security service providers (MSSPs).

MSSPs have typically invested in the level of automation required to not just deploy these tools but also maintain and update them as the cybersecurity threat landscape continuously evolves, noted Wolner. Additionally, GTT is also a Tier One provider of networking services that provides it with access to telemetry data that it analyzes to more proactively respond to those threats, he noted.

That telemetry data is also being used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models to identify and respond to threats at levels of scale that few organizations are going to be able to replicate, said Wolner.

It’s not clear how many organizations are opting to rely more on MSSPs or to what degree. GTT, for example, provides a range of service options that span from managing security end-to-end to a range of co-management options through which it collaborates with internal cybersecurity and networking teams.

Regardless of approach, the number of organizations that can successfully maintain security without any external help is only going to continue to dwindle as the volume of cyberattacks being launched continues to increase in both volume and sophistication.