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partners or system integrators, as well as by the analyst community, which is giving us additional support resulting in us getting involved in many opportunities. Even from a hiring standpoint, being a hot company in a hot category and being a leader in the category is attracting great talent to us,” he said. “We have been very successful in financial verticals, with marquee logos in those verticals, and in oil and gas. These are traditionally loyal, die-hard customers of incumbent vendors and we have been able to convince them to move to us. Now, we also have multi-national global retailers, hospitality chains, manufacturing, technology companies. So, we are now a mass market move, as opposed to a niche move. “Winning large financials gives you extra credibility because credit card companies or big banks go through very stringent processes to quality and certify vendors. Once companies see that happen they get the confidence to pursue further with us. That, and having partners in the UK like Colt and Virgin Media, really helps us address a broad market where we don’t have the coverage or the channel to directly touch them ourselves.” In conclusion, Ahuja said: “For us, it is all about coverage. The minute we add resources in a territory where we haven’t had them, we start to identify opportunities and the opportunities are closing fast.” www.versa-networks.com a software business. “While we have hardware that is built by our partners, we work across many different vendors with our solutions. One thing about the current environment is that vendors that have only one brand or their own brand of hardware have been challenged with supply – component supply and supply of product. But with our solution customers can choose a variety of solutions on the hardware front.” Hybrid working This flexibility, he suggests, is particularly important in an era of home working and hybrid working when users will want to connect directly to cloud or multi-cloud applications from their home or office without compromising the compliance and info-security status of the enterprise or visibility for its IT department. Versa Network’s Experiences and Attitudes Towards a Post-COVID Workforce report suggests that SASE has overtaken VPNs as enterprises’ preferred connectivity solution and, with Gartner forecasting the SASE market to grow at a CAGR of 42% to 2024, when at least 40% of enterprises will have SASE adoption strategies in place, Ahuja is understandably bullish about the future. “Right now, the phrase that comes to mind is ‘the future’s so bright I’ve gotta wear shades’. We are fortunate enough to be highly regarded by our partners, which could be service providers or reseller functions and a single pane of glass – that ‘single pass and single glass’ as I heard one analyst say – is a clear differentiation for us.” Key differentiators Michael Wood, CMO at Versa Networks, highlights three key elements that differentiate Versa Networks from competitors and have catalysed its growth. 1 A single pane of glass providing visibility and control. “A lot of other solutions involve stitching together multiple clouds and multiple devices, and that is done through partnerships and acquisitions versus integrating everything within one single software stack and one management interface,” he said. 2 A single pass parallel processing architecture. “Traffic flows through our system, whether it is in the cloud or on premises, and all the SASE services operate on that traffic simultaneously. You unencrypt as it comes in, you operate on it and then you pass it along, so you are not service-chaining through multiple services and that drives down the latency, increases the performance and also reduces the security threat surface exposure.” 3 The ability to deploy its solution on premises or via the cloud or a blended combination of both. Another factor that has helped Versa Networks in the last 18 months, according to Ahuja, is the fact that it is predominantly 01732 759725 CONNECTIVITY 42 ...continued The Versa Networks report, Experiences and Attitudes Towards a Post-COVID Workforce , based on a survey of 500 IT and security professionals in the US, UK, France and Germany, highlights numerous security and connectivity problems experienced by workers and growing adoption of SASE to provide seamless security and reliable connectivity across cloud, hybrid and on-premises networks. Common complaints include dropped connections when using bandwidth-hungry applications, such as videoconferencing (36%); a lack of real- time tech support (31%); an inability to enforce security policies across a remote workforce (37%); and an inability to spot new threats facing users (34%). Faced with these challenges, 34% of businesses surveyed claim to have adopted SASE in the past year, compared to just 23% that have implemented VPNs. An additional 30% are planning to adopt SASE in the next six to 12 months. The main reasons for adopting SASE are to improve the security of devices and applications used by remote users (cited by 43%), to prioritise the performance and delivery of business-critical applications in the cloud (31%) and to support more remote workers (31%). Four out of five professionals surveyed (84%) said their business had accelerated their digital transformation and moved to the cloud during the pandemic. Almost half (44%) expect employees to continue to work remotely, either full-time or part-time, once pandemic restrictions are lifted. Despite the rapid uptake of SASE, more than two thirds (69%) of those surveyed remain confused about its true meaning. Just 31% correctly identified SASE as ‘the convergence of networking and security services like CASB, FWaaS and Zero Trust into a single cloud-native service model’. Michael Wood, CMO of Versa Networks, said: “While the survey shows that there is still some work to do in educating IT and security professionals about the true meaning of SASE, the imperative to address both remote security and connectivity issues has led companies away from the old VPN technologies that were riddled with security holes towards SASE, which gives them a compass for the future. While SASE has served them well during lockdown, it will also prove a major asset as they contemplate the move back to the office and towards hybrid working.” Global Digital Transformation Survey: Experiences and Attitudes Towards a Post-COVIDWorkforce Brought to you by Sapio Research Out with the old, in with the new The adoption of SASE has skyrocketed over the last 18 months, with 87% of enterprises reviewing their remote connectivity during the pandemic