In today’s hyper-connected, cloud-first world, enterprises face a stark reality: security cannot be a trade-off for speed, and operational complexity must be minimized. Modern workloads, driven by massive data transfers and emerging AI initiatives, demand immense, unfettered capacity, all while threats grow more sophisticated by the hour.

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Prisma^Ⓡ Access 6.1. This release is more than an update—it’s a transformative step forward in delivering a seamless, high-performance and resilient security service edge (SSE) experience. We’ve focused on substantial enhancements that translate directly into an exceptional user experience, lower operational overhead and an even stronger, AI-powered security posture.

Prisma Access 6.1 builds on three core pillars of customer success: operational simplicity, peak performance and true zero trust security.

Operational Agility and Enhanced Resilience

The operational agility promised to customers requires dramatically reduced administrative friction and flexible deployment options to meet modern organizations’ needs.

In our latest release of Prisma Access 6.1, we’re continuing to build on our ability to deliver operational resilience to our customers with our new SASE Private Location. This helps customers address high-bandwidth locations, improve user-to-application performance, and provide a layer of disaster recovery to ensure your business continues to operate without disruption.

SASE Private Location allows customers to deploy core SSE capabilities within their own infrastructure, ensuring network and security processing remains local and avoiding the need to route traffic back to a central location, which can increase latency. Additionally, in the event of a cloud outage, SASE Private Location provides disaster recovery by routing traffic to the lowest-latency location, whether in the cloud or on-premises, ensuring your users have fast, reliable access for day-to-day activities.

Peak Performance for the AI Era

The future of the enterprise is built on big data and high-speed applications. The security layer must function as an enabler, not a bottleneck. Prisma Access 6.1 is engineered to eliminate friction and latency, even at the highest scale.

We are introducing Colo-Connect 100G for organizations like large data centers, disaster recovery sites, and for companies managing massive data synchronization for AI/ML that all have ultra-high-bandwidth demands. This breakthrough delivers a staggering up to 100 Gbps of secured capacity per region for private app access. This ensures that even massive volumes of traffic are protected by our full suite of AI-powered Cloud-Delivered Security Services (CDSS) without performance degradation, supporting crucial high availability (HA) and failover needs.

Finally, we are simplifying high-scale network connectivity for service providers and large campuses. The new Service Provider Interconnect (SPI) with Non-IPsec capability streamlines high-bandwidth ingress. This feature allows service providers to deliver massive capacity—up to 100 Gbps per interconnect—eliminating the operational overhead and performance bottlenecks previously associated with IPsec tunnel termination for MPLS traffic.

Fortifying Zero Trust with Precision AI

The battleground for security is now dominated by advanced AI and machine learning. Prisma Access 6.1 leverages cutting-edge AI-powered CDSS to proactively stop the most sophisticated and evasive threats.

We are continuing to expand our AI-driven defenses across the entire platform. New detections powered by Precision AI are deployed to defend against sophisticated attacks, including:

• Advanced DNS Security to meticulously detect and block DNS hijacking, malicious DNS misconfigurations, threats hidden within malicious TDS (traffic distribution system) and domain masquerading
• Advanced URL Filtering introduces new protection against “quishing” (phishing via QR codes), deepfake content, new categories for compromised legitimate websites that have been infected with malicious content and file converter websites.
• Advanced WildFire® now performs PDF analysis to detect highly evasive embedded phishing attacks that exploit the PDF format. Additional protection for evasive threats is enhanced with multi-CPU sandboxing to defeat sophisticated malware, and ML-powered API vector categorization for fileless attacks.
• Advanced Threat Prevention with new Exfiltration Shield detection combats stealthy data egress over common, low-profile protocols like DNS relay and HTTP headers, which are frequently used to bypass traditional security controls.

For data security administrators, we are enabling surgical precision with granular data profiles for Enterprise Data Loss Prevention. This allows security teams to define different inline content inspection and response actions within a single policy rule. You can configure the system to block high-risk data patterns while simply alerting on lower-risk ones, dramatically simplifying policy management and reducing rule sprawl.

Prisma Access 6.1 delivers the innovation you need to secure your modern SASE deployment. By focusing on security efficacy, high operational efficiency and the scale needed for future enterprise demands, we are empowering you to secure the way you work now and what comes next.

To begin leveraging these new features and to dive deeper into all other enhancements in Prisma Access 6.1, please visit our technical documentation page.