Skyhigh Security Redefines Zero Trust for the Distributed AI Era

First-to-market Hybrid Mesh SSE secures people, AI agents, and data wherever work happens, with local control and up to 50% lower SSE operating costs

SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 28, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The cloud-only era of enterprise security is over. Work now happens everywhere, AI is transforming both the workforce and the threat landscape, and geopolitical realities are forcing organizations to reclaim control over their data and infrastructure. This is the Distributed AI Era, and yesterday's security architectures are no longer sufficient. Today, Skyhigh Security, a leader in data-centric security, launched Skyhigh Hybrid Mesh SSE, an adaptive architecture that delivers Zero Trust and advanced data protection wherever work happens—while simultaneously enabling enterprises to reduce Security Service Edge (SSE) operating costs by up to 50%.

The Distributed AI Era Is Changing the Rules of Enterprise Security

Three converging forces are reshaping how organizations operate and what it takes to secure them:

• Work is distributed across every location. According to Gallup, 74% of remote-capable employees now work on-site or hybrid. Critical applications and data still span on-premises and cloud environments, and sending in-office traffic out to the cloud and back adds cost, latency, and complexity without adding protection.
• AI is the new insider threat. Employees are integrating sanctioned and unsanctioned AI tools into everyday work, often from inside the corporate network. Autonomous AI agents are gaining access to internal applications, systems, and sensitive data, while Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are creating new connections between AI and private enterprise resources. In Trellix’s 2026 Mind of the CISO report, “The New Insider,” 95% of organizations said they had experienced an insider incident linked to the actions of an AI or autonomous system in the past 12 months. When people and agents operate inside the enterprise, Zero Trust enforcement cannot stop at the cloud’s edge.
• Sovereignty demands local control. Tightening regulation and geopolitical uncertainty are pushing data sovereignty, compliance, and resilience onto the board agenda. Gartner predicts that by 2028, over 50% of multinational enterprises will have digital sovereignty strategies¹. Enterprises need control over where traffic is decrypted, inspected, and logged, and a way to keep operating when an external cloud path fails.
  

It’s Time for a New Approach

"The way of working and the threat landscape have fundamentally changed. People work and use AI everywhere, while autonomous agents are becoming a new kind of insider threat with access to critical enterprise systems," said Vishal Rao, CEO of Skyhigh Security. "At the same time, geopolitical uncertainty is driving greater demands for data control and resilience. Yet security architectures haven't kept pace. We saw this coming and built ahead of it. The Distributed AI Era demands a new standard for security. Skyhigh is setting it by delivering a future-ready platform that delivers more value, is simpler to operate, and costs less."

Skyhigh Hybrid Mesh SSE challenges two long-held assumptions about how enterprise security must be delivered:

1. Achieving Zero Trust requires routing everything through the cloud. Skyhigh Security takes a different approach, intelligently applying one common policy for inspection and enforcement as close to users, applications, and data as possible—locally when they are local and through the cloud when they are not.
2. Stronger security inevitably costs more. Skyhigh rejects that trade-off. Its SSE platform ranked #1 among eight evaluated vendors in the Advanced SSE use case in the 2026 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Security Service Edge². Hybrid Mesh SSE builds on those capabilities with an adaptive architecture and flexible pricing that can deliver up to 50% lower SSE operating costs compared with cloud-only alternatives.

“A modern security architecture for Financial Services must protect a complex environment comprising remote and on-site teams, critical systems across cloud and on-premises data centers, be resilient against a wide range of first- and third-party failure scenarios and adhere to stringent regulations,” said David Boda, Chief Security and Resilience Officer, Nationwide Building Society. “Security solutions should adapt to our business, not the other way around.”

Work Is Hybrid. Security Should Be Too.

Rather than forcing the enterprise into a single delivery model, Skyhigh Hybrid Mesh SSE delivers an adaptive security architecture with five differentiated outcomes:

1. Zero Trust for people and AI, everywhere.
2. Data-centric protection against emerging AI threats.
3. Resilient by design. Sovereign by choice.
4. Unified policy and administration.
5. Up to 50% lower SSE operating costs.
   

"First-generation SSE platforms succeeded by shifting network and web security to the cloud, but the market has changed," said Christopher Steffen, VP of Research, Information Security, Risk and Compliance Management, at Enterprise Management Associates. "Skyhigh Security is redefining what modern SSE must look like. Their Hybrid Mesh approach brings a much-needed structural shift to the industry, empowering enterprise security teams to align enforcement with their true operational realities while dramatically improving the economics of Zero Trust."

Hybrid Mesh SSE is the company's third major innovation of 2026, following Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and the patent-pending Secure Browser Controls. It builds on Skyhigh's established SSE strengths in data loss prevention, secure web access, SaaS security, private application access, Zero Trust, and AI protection—unifying these capabilities across local and cloud environments under one consistent policy framework.

Skyhigh Hybrid Mesh SSE is now globally available. Learn more on the Skyhigh Security website and in the launch blog.

¹Gartner, Operating Model Change Imperative: Sustain Digital Sovereignty by Aligning Risk, Value, and Cost by Remi Gulzar, Peter Skyttegaard, Brandon Germer, Chet Geschickter, Jaime Capella, Jamie Heyes, and Tomas Nielsen (May 25, 2026)

²Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Security Service Edge, Thomas Lintemuth, Theo de Feligonde, John Watts, Jonathan Forest, 3 August 2026

Gartner is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Skyhigh Security

Skyhigh Security is dedicated to securing the world’s data with data-centric security solutions that empower organizations to collaborate freely without compromising on security. Its market-leading Security Service Edge (SSE) portfolio focuses on protecting data use, enabling innovation and compliance across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. For more information, visit https://www.skyhighsecurity.com/.

Media Contact:
Lindsay Yanko, Senior Manager, Communications & Brand | Skyhigh Security
lindsay.yanko@skyhighsecurity.com