Versa extends Zero Trust Network Access

Hybrid cloud and hybrid work have changed where and how users work, challenging organizations to find ways to secure the enterprise while delivering the best user experience. Cloud-delivered Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions are widely adopted to secure remote work, but cannot deliver the application performance and inline policy enforcement needed for workers at the office. With Versa’s Zero Trust Everywhere, organizations significantly improve their security posture and user experience while reducing their costs of managing multiple security products.

According to Gartner®, “ZTNA is the fastest growing established security software category in 2022 and has the highest forecasted growth rate through 2026…Most ZTNA offerings support remote users but deactivate when the user is in an office. However, buyers want the ability to maintain a zero-trust security posture regardless of the location of the user…To effectively compete and differentiate in the ZTNA market, product leaders wanting to get ahead of emerging technologies and trends’ impact on offerings should extend ZTNA to all users, including campus and branch office locations, to enable a zero-trust security posture everywhere, not just for remote users.” 1

Versa is the market leader in Unified SASE, with a complete set of offerings to protect and connect users, devices, and sites to applications anywhere. Deployed by thousands of enterprises and service providers globally, Versa’s innovative offerings converge security with networking within an AI/ML-powered single-vendor Unified SASE platform that delivers organically developed best-of-breed functions that tightly integrate and deliver services via the cloud, on-premises, or as a blended combination of both, managed through a single pane of glass. Versa Zero Trust Everywhere leverages these strengths to extend Zero Trust to the campus and branch.

The Challenge of Securing the Hybrid Workforce

Hybrid work is now the norm, with much of today’s workforce alternating between corporate offices and remote locations. For onsite work today, the current perimeter-oriented approach to securing network access implicitly trusts all users and devices inside the network. The problem with this approach is that a compromised device or a bad actor is also trusted, and can move freely inside the perimeter. In contrast, Zero Trust is widely acknowledged as a superior security model, and ZTNA solutions are being adopted to secure remote work. Unfortunately, today’s cloud-delivered ZTNA approaches are inadequate for campus and branch environments. As a result, organizations end up deploying and maintaining duplicate security products, which creates potential security gaps and misconfigurations, a poor user experience, and increased complexity and costs.

According to a Gartner® report, “Enterprises spend billions to secure campus networks via a combination of switching features and NAC — an approach ripe for disruption with the shift to hybrid work…Extending ZTNA products to campus environments creates several benefits for enterprises, including unified policy, enhanced visibility and consumption-oriented licensing…Gartner believes evolving existing ZTNA products to secure campus/branch environments better aligns with future work patterns and zero trust principles, and it simplifies the operational and administrative burden to manage the solution.” 2

Versa Zero Trust Everywhere Delivers Zero Trust Across the Enterprise with Optimized User Experience

With Versa Zero Trust Everywhere, enterprises can now leverage Versa’s AI/ML-powered Unified SASE platform to enable in-line Zero Trust policy enforcement for both remote workers and onsite/hybrid workers in campus and branch offices, while delivering an excellent user-to-application experience. With today’s announcement, Versa is expanding its portfolio with two new products to deliver Zero Trust Everywhere: 

Versa Zero Trust – Premises (ZT-Prem) is a secure access solution for branch and campus users connecting to applications and workloads hosted in the enterprise data centers or private clouds. It applies granular, Zero Trust access policies to users and devices based on continuous assessment of identity, device posture, and application. The product is designed to be integrated into any campus or branch architecture as a standalone appliance.

Versa Secure Software-Defined LAN (Versa SD-LAN) modernizes the campus and branch LAN with a software-defined, hardware agnostic approach. It delivers an in-line ZTNA solution and an assured user-to-application experience. Key capabilities include switching and routing at line rate speeds with distributed adaptive micro-segmentation; inline Zero Trust policy enforcement at the user, device and application level; dynamic best-path traffic selection to optimize user-to-application experience; advanced automation; and AI/ML-based network and security anomaly detection.

“This release exemplifies what is feasible when your engineering teams blend technical depth in both security and networking,” said Kumar Mehta, co-founder and Chief Development Officer for Versa Networks. “The ability to build a solution that can enforce least-privilege policies everywhere, including LAN campus switches, WAN and cloud, is unsurpassed amongst SASE providers. With Versa, organizations can now improve their security posture with Zero Trust enterprise-wide, as well as extend it to all users no matter where they choose to work, with a unified view and consistent security management at better economics and efficiency.”