Modern organizations rely on a variety of workers, from full-time employees to contractors, to move their business forward. A recent study estimates that nearly 36% of the workforce recognizes themselves as independent workers. As organizations embrace bring your own device (BYOD) policies, they often allow employees and contractors to use their personal devices to connect to business applications. While this creates a greater degree of flexibility for workers, it creates a significant gap in the security posture. These unmanaged devices create two unique challenges:
- Increased Security Risks from Personal Devices – While most IT teams are focused on securing the managed devices, attackers can easily exploit vulnerabilities in these personal unmanaged devices. These devices are increasingly being targeted with sophisticated attacks, including phishing and smishing, to get access to company information.
- Organizational Blind Spot with Unmanaged Devices – In most organizations, IT teams do not have visibility into the information and corporate applications that workers access on these unmanaged devices. This creates a massive security gap and operational challenge for organizations, with a lack of visibility and controls for their workforce.
We believe SASE needs to evolve to secure all devices – managed and unmanaged – for complete Zero Trust security. Today, we announced our intention to acquire Talon, a pioneer of Enterprise Browser technology. The proposed acquisition will enable Palo Alto Networks® customers to extend Prisma SASE’s leading Zero Trust and cloud-delivered security to unmanaged devices, including desktop and mobile.
Current Approaches for Securing Unmanaged Devices Are Ineffective
To enable the use of unmanaged devices, security teams are forced into an impossible tradeoff. They are forced to either ignore security entirely in favor of flexibility and user experience, or to adopt cumbersome technologies, like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), that add operational complexity and lead to a suboptimal user experience. Modern organizations need a flexible solution that offers both security and user experience without compromise.
Prisma SASE & Talon Will Extend Zero Trust Security to Unmanaged Devices
Talon’s Enterprise Browser enables organizations to adopt BYOD securely.
- Security for All Work Activity – Talon enables unmanaged devices to securely access enterprise apps and protect them from ever-evolving threats, including malware, phishing, malicious domains and other attack techniques, like keylogging. This improves the security posture of the entire organization.
- Comprehensive Visibility and Control – Talon provides data security controls natively in the browser to prevent data exfiltration. For example, organizations can put controls in place for downloading files, copying sensitive data, and taking screenshots. It also provides comprehensive visibility into work-related online activities on these unmanaged devices, without touching the personal usage of the device, to ensure complete respect for user privacy.
- Seamless Onboarding – Talon makes it easy for IT administrators to onboard new users and have a single sign-on (SSO) integration framework on all devices and operating systems, providing a seamless user experience and reducing operational complexity.
Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE delivers the industry’s leading SASE solution that unifies network security, SD-WAN and Autonomous Digital Experience Management into a cloud-delivered service. Once we integrate Talon’s Enterprise Browser with Prisma SASE, after closing our proposed acquisition, customers will be able to apply best-in-class security to all users and get unprecedented visibility into all devices connecting to business applications.
As organizations adopt the new reality of distributed work, applications moving to the cloud, and users increasingly using personal devices for accessing work applications and data, it is more critical than ever to have a consistent security posture across the entire workforce. We are excited at the prospect of bringing together Talon’s Enterprise Browser and Prisma SASE as a combined solution to securely enable all users across all devices to access business applications, including private applications, and apply consistent security no matter who the user is and what device they use for work.
Forward-Looking Statements
This blog contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the anticipated benefits and impact of the proposed acquisition on Palo Alto Networks and its customers. There are a significant number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made in this blog, including, but not limited to: the effect of the announcement of the proposed acquisition on the parties’ commercial relationships and workforce; the ability to satisfy the conditions to the closing of the acquisition; the abilitity to consummate the proposed acquisition on a timely basis or at all; the ability of Palo Alto Networks to integrate Talon’s technology, operations and business; developments and changes in general market, political, economic and business conditions; risks associated with managing our growth; risks associated with new products and subscription and support offerings; shifts in priorities or delays in the development or release of new offerings, or the failure to timely develop and achieve market acceptance of new products and subscriptions, as well as existing products and subscription and support offerings; rapidly evolving technological developments in the market for security products and subscription and support offerings; our customers’ purchasing decisions and the length of sales cycles; our competition; our ability to attract and retain new customers; our ability to acquire and integrate other companies, products or technologies in a successful manner; our debt repayment obligations; and our share repurchase program, which may not be fully consummated or enhance shareholder value, and any share repurchases which could affect the price of our common stock.
Additional risks and uncertainties that could affect our financial results are included under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC on September 1, 2023, which is available on our website at investors.paloaltonetworks.com and on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Additional information will also be set forth in other filings that we make with the SEC from time to time. All forward-looking statements in this blog are based on information available to us as of the date hereof, and we do not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.