Skyhigh Security launched Skyhigh Hybrid Mesh SSE on October 28, 2026, an adaptive security architecture that delivers Zero Trust and advanced data protection wherever work happens, locally when users, applications and data are local, and through the cloud when they are not. The company says the approach breaks the assumption that stronger security must cost more, claiming enterprises can cut Security Service Edge operating costs by up to 50 percent compared with cloud-only alternatives.
The Distributed AI Era Problem
Skyhigh frames the launch around three converging forces. Work is now distributed across every location: according to Gallup, 74 percent of remote-capable employees now work on-site or hybrid, and critical applications and data still span on-premises and cloud environments, so sending in-office traffic out to the cloud and back adds cost, latency and complexity without adding protection. Second, AI has become a new insider threat: employees use sanctioned and unsanctioned AI tools from inside the corporate network, autonomous agents gain access to internal applications and sensitive data, and Model Context Protocol servers create new connections between AI and private enterprise resources.
The numbers behind that second claim are striking. In Trellix’s 2026 Mind of the CISO report, “The New Insider,” 95 percent of organisations said they had experienced an insider incident linked to the actions of an AI or autonomous system in the past 12 months. The third force is sovereignty: tightening regulation and geopolitical uncertainty are pushing data control, compliance and resilience onto the board agenda, and Gartner predicts that by 2028, over 50 percent of multinational enterprises will have digital sovereignty strategies. Enterprises need control over where traffic is decrypted, inspected and logged, and a way to keep operating when an external cloud path fails.
Two Assumptions Challenged
“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, chief executive of Skyhigh Security. “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.”
Hybrid Mesh SSE challenges two long-held assumptions. The first is that achieving Zero Trust requires routing everything through the cloud; Skyhigh instead applies one common policy for inspection and enforcement as close to users, applications and data as possible. The second is that stronger security inevitably costs more: Skyhigh notes its SSE platform ranked first among eight evaluated vendors in the Advanced SSE use case in Gartner’s 2026 Critical Capabilities for Security Service Edge, and says Hybrid Mesh builds on those capabilities with flexible pricing that can deliver the claimed cost reduction.
Five Outcomes, And A Customer Voice
Skyhigh describes five differentiated outcomes for the architecture: Zero Trust for people and AI everywhere; data-centric protection against emerging AI threats; resilient by design and sovereign by choice; unified policy and administration; and up to 50 percent lower SSE operating costs. It is the company’s third major innovation of 2026, following Data Security Posture Management and the patent-pending Secure Browser Controls, and it unifies existing strengths in data loss prevention, secure web access, SaaS security, private application access, Zero Trust and AI protection under one consistent policy framework.
David Boda, chief security and resilience officer at Nationwide Building Society, said a modern security architecture for financial services must protect remote and on-site teams, critical systems across cloud and on-premises data centres, and stringent regulations, and that security solutions should adapt to the business rather than the other way around. Christopher Steffen, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates, called the Hybrid Mesh approach a much-needed structural shift, empowering security teams to align enforcement with their true operational realities while improving the economics of Zero Trust. Hybrid Mesh SSE is now globally available.
Why It Matters
This matters because the security perimeter has quietly dissolved twice over: first when work left the office, and again when AI agents started acting inside the network with access to systems no human employee would be handed unsupervised. A security model that only inspects traffic at the cloud’s edge cannot see either shift clearly, which is why the same identity question now runs through verified identities for AI agents and an identity and a kill switch for every agent. Enforcement has to follow the work, not the other way around.
The claim to watch is the cost figure. “Up to 50 percent lower” is a vendor claim about operating costs versus cloud-only alternatives, not a measured result across deployments, and enterprises will judge Hybrid Mesh on whether local enforcement genuinely simplifies operations or merely moves complexity on-premises. If it delivers, it reframes Zero Trust economics at exactly the moment AI agents are multiplying the things that need trusting, much as safe places for agents to run code are becoming infrastructure rather than add-ons. If it does not, it is another architecture diagram in a crowded market.
Background
Skyhigh Security, based in San Jose, California, is dedicated to data-centric security, with a Security Service Edge portfolio focused on protecting data use and enabling innovation and compliance across cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments.
Source: Skyhigh announcement
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