Island Launches SASE Rebuilt for the AI Era, Powered by the Perfect Packet Architecture

Production-proven across Fortune 500 enterprises, the Perfect Packet architecture analyzes, inspects, and secures traffic at the optimal point, whether on device or in the cloud, eliminating the friction of legacy SASE

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Island, the platform for enterprise work, today launched a fundamentally new SASE architecture powered by the Perfect Packet, designed for a world where AI agents, remote workers, and local tools have replaced the office as the center of how work gets done.

The result: up to 90% of sessions go direct with no backhaul. Deployment in as few as five minutes to managed and unmanaged devices. Up to 10x faster application access when traffic takes the direct path. And zero SSL/TLS break-and-inspect required for browser traffic.

Designed alongside and deployed in production with Fortune 500 customers from day one, Island is now bringing it to the broader market.

Work changed. SASE didn't, until now.

Work no longer flows through the corporate network. People work from everywhere, asynchronously, across SaaS apps and AI tools. AI agents now call local and remote tools and MCPs on behalf of users and organizations. SASE was designed to securely connect users and offices to apps and networks. In the near future, an organization's agent workforce will operate using employees' roles and access but at 100x the scale. Networking patterns have fundamentally shifted.

Traditional SASE was built for a different era. It routes traffic through distant cloud proxies, decrypts and re-encrypts sessions, and applies policy in transit. That model is expensive, outage-prone, and forces long rollouts that seldom deliver on core objectives at scale. Organizations end up limiting how they work to accommodate the limitations of the design. Worse, the architecture cannot see what's happening inside an AI session, an agent workflow, or a browser tab. It inspects connections. It cannot interpret intent.

The Perfect Packet: Security at the true edge

Island's Perfect Packet architecture moves enforcement to where work actually happens. Traffic is analyzed, inspected, and secured at the most appropriate location: at the user experience layer inside the workstation, or, when needed, at hundreds of nearby points of presence (PoPs) deployed across the premium networks of GCP, Azure, and AWS.

The Island Enterprise Platform, spanning the Island Enterprise Browser, Island Extension, and Island Desktop, evaluates identity, device posture, geolocation, application context, and user activity at the moment of interaction. Most traffic flows directly. Island only steers traffic into its global network when inspection or routing services truly add value. Backhaul becomes the fallback, not the default.

Two independent network stacks provide built-in resilience and automatic failover.

Better for end users, not just operators

Legacy SASE penalizes the end user: slower applications, broken sessions, and VPN headaches. And on unmanaged devices, it often doesn't work at all, since traditional architectures require agents and certificates that contractors, BYOD users, and third parties can't install. The Perfect Packet architecture was designed from the start to make work faster and smoother for everyone, on any device. Direct-path traffic means applications load faster. No VPN means no friction. No unnecessary TLS inspection means fewer broken sessions and certificate errors. Deployment takes minutes, not months, across both managed and unmanaged devices.

Built for AI and agents

AI didn't create new risks. It exposed the limits of network-based enforcement. Prompts, uploads, tool calls, and AI-generated output all occur at the point of intent, not in transit. Network inspection sees connections. It cannot see clipboard actions, tenant context, prompt content, or file transfers between apps.

Island governs AI at the point of intent, with full user, device, and session context. Organizations enable AI without exposing sensitive data or losing control of what happens next. No binary block decisions that push users toward shadow AI. Every AI session carries a full audit trail, including which data types were sent, to which applications, by which users, across both human and agentic workflows.

"If your SASE can't see what's happening inside an AI session, you're not governing AI. You're guessing," said Dan Amiga, Island's CTO and Co-founder. "We built the Perfect Packet network because the old model of backhauling everything through a proxy adds blind spots and cost. When you protect data before it moves and evaluate policy in real time, security runs at the speed of work."

The full SASE stack, unified

Island delivers the complete SASE stack on a single enterprise control plane, without inheriting the legacy proxy-first architecture:

• Island Private Access: Zero trust network access (ZTNA) to private applications without VPNs or exposed networks.
• Secure Web Gateway: Precision web security without default backhaul or forced TLS inspection.
• Remote Browser Isolation: Cloud-rendered protection invoked only for high-risk destinations.
• Data Protection: Last-mile DLP in the browser and at the endpoint, without decrypt-everything architectures.
• Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB): Visibility and control inside SaaS environments through native APIs, monitoring files, permissions, and configurations without rerouting traffic.
• AI Protection: Governs prompts, tools, MCPs, uploads, and generated output across users, devices, and agents, with a full audit trail of every AI session.
• Digital Experience (DEX) Monitoring: Real-time insight into application performance, device health, and employee experience.

About Island

Island is the ideal environment for enterprise work. By unifying modern work requirements into a single Enterprise Platform, Island enables organizations to see, control, and protect work activity while making work itself smooth and simple. Leading enterprises from across major industries are using Island to safely embrace AI, onboard contractors in minutes, enable BYOD, reduce VDI spend, quickly recover from disasters, facilitate M&A, and eliminate unnecessary infrastructure and related expenses. Island is backed by world-class investors including Coatue Management, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Cyberstarts. Island can be reached at [e-mail] or [phone].