The multi-cloud networking upstart is partnering with the “de facto” security leader Palo Alto Networks. The new relationship will give enterprises new approach to securing applications and workloads across multi-cloud environments, Prosimo execs told CRN.

Multi-cloud networking upstart Prosimo is joining forces with security specialist Palo Alto Networks to further secure application access at a time when multi-cloud environments reign supreme, according to Prosimo.

Prosimo, which emerged from stealth mode in 2021, has been engaging with more Fortune 500 companies as of late. The company in the process has learned about the unique networking requirements for connecting clouds and virtual private networks that these businesses need from their vendors, said Mehul Patel, head of customer insights and intelligence marketing for Prosimo.

“Security is having a bigger and bigger say,” Patel said. “Every RFP that we’ve been part of over the last six months, it’s almost the assumption that the security team will say: ‘If you’re going to make any connections in the cloud, assume that they must apply to zero trust principles.’”

Rather than attempt to build security capabilities, Prosimo decided to team up with one the “de facto” security leaders that works with nearly all of the same Fortune 500 companies that Prosimo is working with today, he said.

[Related: Prosimo CEO: The Networking Incumbents ‘Aren’t Looking At Cloud Networking The Same Way’]

The new partnership between Prosimo and Palo Alto is aimed at closing the gaps between secure application access across multi-cloud environments for users and workloads. Prosimo’s Full Stack Cloud Transit platform will now integrate with Palo Alto’s Prisma Cloud technology, which will let enterprises put firewalls as close as possible to the workloads they protect to route and manage that traffic, according to the two companies.

The strategy, “zero trust by default,” means that “all the goodies from the security world” are baked into the process the moment a workload is spun up, said Mani Ganesan, Prosimo’s vice president of product.

“Here’s my application sitting in AWS, and it needs to go access an AI service in GCP. That’s where the multi-cloud networking comes in where [we say], ‘We can securely connected take you from point A to point B across cloud across regions with our software stack,’” Ganesan said. “Now, all the way from that starting point, we can have a firewall all the way across in that mix, not just in the middle.”

At the same time, the firewall has all the application context it needs from Prosimo to make decisions, he said.

Via the terms of the new partnership, Prosimo is offering a centralized and distributed deployment model for Palo Alto Networks firewalls. The centralized option has Palo Alto’s firewall deployed into a centralized virtual private cloud for East-West or North-South, or cloud to on-prem traffic. This is the most common model, according to Prosimo.

The distributed model has a Palo Alto firewall deployed in each virtual private cloud. This method is more common in use cases in which virtual private clouds must be isolated and require only local ingress or egress, the company said.

Businesses will also save money because not all traffic will be immediately routed to the firewall if it’s not necessary, which can drive up the costs of the firewall, Ganesan said.

“That’s where the context awareness comes in. Say something is PCI-compliant and this is the level of security that’s needed — Prosimo knows that and we’re going to route the traffic to firewall with all the context [so] the firewall can do its job,” he said.

The relationship between Prosimo and Palo Alto will let enterprises “right size” their firewall needs, Ganesan said.

“The amount of money we’re speaking about here — just the firewall cost alone can be $20 – $30 million for a very large enterprise in the cloud so even if you shave off 30-40 percent, that is actually a massive benefit and we [aren’t] taking away anything from security, we are providing that application context.”

Prosimo plans to work with other security vendors in a similar fashion, Ganesan said.

“The same integration model could be easily extended to any other firewall,” he said.