Sunil Khandekar, Chief Enterprise Development Officer at Mplify, who led the development of the ELC in 2023, said the group’s efforts and the manifesto reflect a move to work directly with enterprises. Traditionally, Mplify (previously MEF) worked mainly with vendors and service providers.
“This is a real shift in how we work with enterprise stakeholders,” he said. “We had a strong presence with service providers and technology vendors, but never with enterprises, but I always said that we need to talk to the enterprises.”
The manifesto highlights the industry’s lack of clarity on which service and technology providers meet independently validated security standards and asserts that certification must become the baseline across the ecosystem.
Known as the Manifesto for Advancing Trust, Assurance, and Resilience through SASE Certification, the effort has the backing of leaders from some of the largest companies across multiple market segments, including Accenture, Bloomberg, Burberry, Decathlon, Grab, Morgan Stanley, Santander, Siemens Healthineers, TD Bank, UPMC, and Williams-Sonoma.
“The Enterprise Leadership Council (ELC) is at the core of the enterprise program, and it’s an advisory board of senior leaders,” Khandekar said. “These leaders are engaged because they know what’s at stake for their connectivity for connected automation and now the AI wave that’s coming.”
Overcoming fragmentation
Since its inception, the ELC has continued to gain size and influence.
Through the ELC’s manifesto, the main hope is to overcome the fragmentation that enterprises face in creating cybersecurity plans for their organizations.
In particular, the ELC has made strides across three critical domains:
· Automation: This element addresses network circuit impairment issues. Mplify's Lifecycle Service Orchestration APIs enable frictionless service automation of dynamic digital services between buyers and sellers.
· Cybersecurity: Within cybersecurity, Mplify noted that as enterprises enhance their connections to more SASE services, it becomes more important for them to have more secure network connectivity, whether that be Ethernet or private line services like optical wavelengths.
· AI operations: Mplify is creating secure frameworks for high-performance, scalable network infrastructures that can handle next-generation AI workloads.
“The SASE manifesto addresses the urgency for SASE certification,” Khandekar said. “It’s a direct response to all these multi-vector AI-driven cyber trends.”
He added that enterprises want “clarity, assurance in a very fragmented security landscape, and the SASE framework is an industry-wide call to action that is urging the Mplify board, as well as the technology advisory board, which is all the technology vendors, to get solutions and services SASE certified.”
Adopt with confidence
As ELC has identified common problems across how enterprise services, particularly security, are addressed, it is necessary to look at two main imperatives:
· Certifications: This calls to have providers and technology vendors to get SASE certified for all their products.
· Enterprise alignment: The manifesto calls for all solution providers to align with the needs of enterprises.
Khandekar said achieving these goals helps enterprises adopt SASE services “with confidence.”
“An enterprise will say If I am adopting a solution, does it work as advertised?” he said. “This gives me the confidence to adopt those technologies because I know they have been certified by an independent third party.”
Enterprise growth
Since the ELC was launched, Mplify continues to see growth and interest from enterprises.
While enterprises want to adopt more SASE services and achieve automation, they don’t want to compromise on security.
“As enterprises look to digitize more of their business, they don’t want to do it at the cost of it not being secure,” Khandekar said.
While there continue to be new services that offer greater speeds, security has become continually intertwined with security.
“You can’t have one without the other, especially with the AI-driven threats, which demand a new standard of assurance,” Khandekar said. “SASE certification is how we turn that escalation into reality for secure and scalable connectivity.”
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