Industry Insights

Strategies for Navigating a Successful Cloud Migration

October 26, 2020 by Krupa Patil

A third (33%) of all organizations have failed to successfully implement their cloud strategies in 2019. Despite best efforts post-migration, network performance, security, and management problems continue to shoot up. As failed cloud migrations glaringly highlight the need to reinvent traditional WAN networks, organizations are increasingly turning to Secure SD-WAN for the help they need to successfully move to the cloud.

Who doesn’t want to move to the cloud today? It’s scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient—everything that traditional data centers are not. Besides, users have grown increasingly mobile, making the “anytime, anywhere, and any-device” access the new normal for business continuity. So, it’s only natural that organizations are increasingly investing in a cloud-first migration, instead of struggling with the ailing and outdated data center. Ironically, very few organizations are actually able to tap into the cloud advantages. Instead of growing the business, cloud migration has plunged organizations into a quicksand of everyday problems:

• Applications are running slowly with high packet loss, jitter, and latency. Users are frustrated with the delayed access to business-critical applications, choppy audio calls, jittery and dropped video calls, and more.
• Security gaps are increasing by the day, and the hardware-centric WAN architecture is a huge bottleneck in security enforcements because of their complexity
• Cloud traffic management has turned into a nightmare for the IT teams who have to balance limited bandwidth capacity with a large number of users who are simultaneously trying to access their cloud applications from anywhere in the world
• Capital expenses are shooting through the roof as the IT leaders are trying to meet the increased bandwidth demands

Why are most cloud migrations falling flat?

Moving the workloads to IaaS and aggressively adopting SaaS applications generate a torrential flow of new network traffic that spike bandwidth and increase application performance demands. Traditional WAN networks, unfortunately, are not designed to handle these new requirements.

The Top 3 Challenges for An Organizations’ Cloud Migration:

1. Difficulty with Internet and MPLS Connections: Traditional WAN networks typically leverage MPLS as their primary mode of transport. Because MPLS comes with limited bandwidth capacity, backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center heavily congests the network, introducing packet loss, jitter, and latency. Although internet broadband can help accommodate the excess traffic, it does not offer the reliability and security of an MPLS line. Also, MPLS is expensive and comes with lengthy provisioning times and purchasing additional MPLS is not budget friendly. As a result, cloud applications run painfully slow, degrading the end-user experience and their productivity.
2. Challenges with Configuring Consistent Security: Directly accessing public cloud platforms dramatically expands the threat surface because organizations no longer have control and visibility outside of their network. To secure information flow, the network operations team will need to understand the cloud environment’s functional complexities and meticulously implement the best security practices to address new cloud risks. Even in a traditional WAN network, security policies must be configured manually, box-by-box. With several point security devices to configure, the entire exercise consumes a significant amount of time, not to mention the high chances of configuration errors that cause gaps for serious breaches. Now that users are accessing critical business applications outside of the WAN network, configuring, monitoring, and implementing best security practices are even more complex.
3. Gaps in Cloud and On-Premises Management: Cloud environments come with varying functional complexities. In the case of a multi-cloud or a hybrid-cloud deployment, orchestrating different cloud environments, connecting them to data centers, and interconnecting them all in an MPLS WAN network easily becomes a nightmare for network architects. The entire deployment and interconnecting process can take weeks or even months to complete. In a large, heterogeneous network, visibility is key to proactively preventing and containing security breaches and maintaining overall network health. Unfortunately, traditional WAN networks offer little visibility because of the complex topologies and dedicated point devices sourced from a plethora of vendors. Add on the complexity of multi-cloud, the lack of visibility makes troubleshooting the complex traffic patterns both on-premises and off-premises a huge challenge for the IT team.

To streamline and simplify cloud operations, as well as keep up with the changing cloud demands, organizations need to focus on modernizing their network infrastructure, and SD-WAN (or Software-Defined Networking) is the smart choice that can help pave the way for modern, resilient, and secure networks.

How to resolve cloud migration challenges:

1. Adopt a New Architecture for Better Application Performance: To meet with the growing bandwidth demands of cloud applications, SD-WAN offers transport link flexibility that allows organizations to create a unified pool of multiple WAN connections. This unique architecture helps leverage passive transport links such as the cheaper internet broadband and 4G LTE links instead of relying on MPLS alone, thereby significantly increasing the overall bandwidth capacity. Another advantage of leveraging a SD-WAN architecture is the application-aware routing that automatically prioritizes traffic based on the business-intent policies and directs it across the most optimal transport route. In case of an unpredicted downtime, organizations leveraging SD-WAN automatically implement best fail-over strategies in seconds to get the business application back up and running. By decongesting the network and intelligently routing application traffic, an SD-WAN architecture radically improves the end-user experience and the overall network health.
2. Ensure that Security is Embedded Into the Ground Design: To ensure all cloud-hosted workloads are protected, organizations need an approach that integrates full-stack security, including next-gen firewall, malware protection, sandboxing, intrusion prevention, and more, directly into their WAN architecture. With embedded security, organizations can instantly identify cloud application traffic and apply optimal security policies without needing to go to multiple management consoles. Also, embedded security offers single-pass consistency that eliminates the need to backhaul cloud traffic to the data center, and instead route it directly to the cloud destination. Not only does backhauling cloud traffic saves substantial MPLS bandwidth and increase security hygiene, it also reduces CapEx. Lastly, security segmentation in the form of multi-tenancy is necessary for different lines of business trying to prevent lateral movement between departments, groups, and locations. Multi-tenancy is a key component that empowers the security team with granular and layered control over the entire network, which is critical to confront today’s evolving threat landscape.
3. Centralize Your Management and Administration Interfaces: Organizations need to take a centralized approach to network management. Monitoring multiple cloud environments, rolling out policy configurations, and troubleshooting issues should be done via a single-pane-of-glass interface, otherwise policies may not be properly executed throughout the organization. In addition, managing multiple administrative consoles is time-consuming, complex, and introduce security risks. When you have a single management interface that maintains consistent policies across the entire environment, you can also easily audit and ensure regulatory compliance. Always choose a solution that can easily integrate with your brownfield environment and thus, alleviate different multiple cloud complexities and orchestrate and interconnect workflows. By centralizing your management console, you greatly streamline and simplify the cloud deployment process for the IT team.

When a substantial amount of a companies’ IT budget dedicated to cloud services, getting the network infrastructure cloud-ready becomes a top priority. It is the only way to capitalize on the cloud investment, as well as achieve business resilience that is required to be successful in a post-COVID world. Adopting these strategies for your cloud migration initiative (or re-initiative) will help you achieve all the scalability, flexibility, performance, and reliability that is the promise of the cloud.

Company Updates

Leading the Secure SD-WAN and SASE Charge

October 14, 2020 by Kelly Ahuja

It has been a ground-breaking year for Versa Networks as we have proven our business execution, technology leadership, and product maturity which has been reflected in Versa’s position as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge. In the 2020 Gartner Critical Capabilities for WAN Edge, Versa scored the highest for the Large Global Enterprise Use Case, SD-WAN + Security, and SD-WAN. We have been recognized with several numerous awards for our product and technology innovation. Versa Networks, steeped in a long history of engineering and research brilliance, needed to take a highly technical and precocious product and prove to the market that we have the business chops too.

We have executed and delivered. I am proud to be part of this incredible team of talented and diverse industry professionals who continue to drive the company forward.

Building a Scalable, Repeatable Sales Model

One of the key initiatives we have focused on over the past couple of years has been to build a scalable and repeatable Go-To-Market model. We increased our investment and expanded our marketing, sales, and partner channels. This year alone, we have doubled our sales and marketing teams with the company now consisting of over 120 enterprise sales and sales engineering professionals across both direct sales and the channel ecosystem that support our partners.

These investments have exceeded our expectations and yielded better than anticipated results. We have added many impressive global blue-chip logos to our valued customer roster. In addition, we have added new Service Provider partners. Just this past month, Deutsche Telekom and MCM Telecom chose Versa over other SD-WAN providers as their preferred partner “after a lengthy evaluation due to its security, performance, and analytics capabilities”. What makes customer’s fall in love with Versa is the power of the product.

Disrupting the Market with Product Innovation

Time and time again, we see our product outperform the market. This comes to no surprise as our founders, Apurva and Kumar Mehta, are networking luminaries who predicted the future for networking with security. Since the early stages of the company, they have remained focused on building a top-notch engineering team that has delivered this market-leading platform.

With nearly 500 employees and growing, we are continuing to innovate, execute, and deliver solutions that combine routing, security, cloud, analytics, and SD-WAN. This year alone, we have added significant updates to Versa Titan, our cloud-managed solution for lean IT. We broke ground with Versa Concerto, our automation and orchestration platform. Versa Secure Access, our “work-from-anywhere” Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution, was the first-ever on the market to deliver remote and private connectivity to employees with the full suite of Secure SD-WAN capabilities directly onto their device.

Strategically Aligning on Industry Thought Leadership

A core philosophy that we hold dear is to always build the products of tomorrow. We believe that to do so, we have to continually listen, anticipate, and execute to stay ahead of industry trends and outpace the market. When our Secure SD-WAN product first came into conception, our founders stressed the importance of integrating security as there is no network worth having without security embedded. We built best-of-breed security directly into the fabric of our Secure SD-WAN flagship product.

As a result of this philosophy, we find ourselves in the envious position to be a leader in where the industry is finally headed. Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, was a term coined by Gartner in 2019, is the convergence of SD-WAN, networking, and network security capabilities such as next generation firewall delivered through a single cloud service. While we did not invent this term or category, we have been developing against the fundamental elements of SASE since the company was founded in 2012. Today, with 90 globally distributed Versa Cloud Gateways, Versa delivers the most intuitive and robust solution for secure client-to-cloud connectivity for users to connect to applications anywhere, anytime.

Looking Towards the Future

The Versa team is a passionate, spirited, competitive, and determined group that operates and executes as a family. Every new customer, key milestone, new product or release creates a flurry of enthusiastic chants from our team. The excitement is palpable, and the momentum is building. Being named a leader and scoring the highest in multiple categories in Gartner’s 2020 WAN edge reports is only a small testament to the ground-breaking work that we are achieving here at Versa. I am confident that we will continue to make great strides and grow to be an incredibly successful company.

Company Updates

Versa Networks Receives Highest Score for Large Global WAN Use Cases in Gartner Critical Capabilities for WAN Edge Infrastructure Report

October 7, 2020 by Michael Wood

With thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of sites, and a significant number of very large financial institutions, retailers, manufactures, high-tech companies, public sector, and healthcare customers, Versa has demonstrated that it is the leader in large global WAN, Secure SD-WAN, and SD-WAN deployments. The Versa Operating System (VOS™) is the foundational architecture for on-premises and cloud deployments of Secure SD-WAN and SASE globally. The distributed system of Versa Cloud Gateways enables these services to extended to the front door step of nearly every cloud service around the world and are the source of networking and network security for cloud native SASE services.

I am incredibly proud to announce that Gartner has given Versa Networks, the leader in Secure SD-WAN and SASE, the highest rating for Large Global WAN Use Cases.¹

According to Gartner, “SD-WAN product differentiation is primarily based on feature breadth and/or depth, specifically on security, application performance optimization and cloud features…Differentiate solutions by comparing their feature depth vs. feature breadth in SD-WAN features, native application performance optimization, operational features/simplicity, security/SASE capabilities, and cloud onramp capabilities.”¹

Evaluating 20 SD-WAN products and services, the Critical Capabilities report is useful for organizations that need to identify a provider that may be best suited to deliver on their secure access service edge (SASE) and SD-WAN requirements. It details the critical capabilities that led to Gartner naming Versa a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, 2020 report, including SD-WAN features, SD-WAN and security features, and Large Global WAN use cases.

Please find a complimentary copy of the full report at https://versa-networks.com/resources/reports/gartner-critical-capabilities-for-wan-edge-infrastructure-2020/

¹Gartner, Critical Capabilities for WAN Edge Infrastructure, Jonathan Forest, Andrew Lerner, Naresh Singh, 30 September 2020

Company Updates

Versa Named as a Leader in Gartner WAN Edge Infrastructure Magic Quadrant

September 29, 2020 by Michael Wood

At Versa Networks, we have focused on developing full-featured SD-WAN, comprehensive integrated security, scalable advanced routing, genuine multi-tenancy, and sophisticated analytics in a single-pass software architecture for Secure SD-WAN and SASE deployments on-premises and in the cloud. It is exciting to see our efforts recognized by our customers and also by leading analysts.

This year, Gartner announced the Magic Quadrant WAN Edge Infrastructure report which analyzes the various vendors in the WAN edge market and identifies Versa as a Leader.

Customers are choosing WAN edge infrastructure which, as defined by Gartner, incorporates a broader class of traditional network functions, that includes routing, next generation firewalls, SD-WAN, application optimization, WAN path control, and WAN optimization. According to Gartner, ”by 2024, to enhance agility and support for cloud applications, 60% of enterprises will have implemented SD-WAN, compared with about 30% in 2020”.

In addition, Gartner estimates that “by 2024, more than 60% of software-defined, wide-area network (SD-WAN) customers will have implemented a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, compared with about 35% in 2020.”

Versa has been continuously executing on our vision to bring Secure SD-WAN and SASE on-premises and in the cloud to customers globally and I am excited to share that Versa has been named as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge, and placed high in Ability to Execute and high in Completeness of Vision.

More information on the features and factors that our customers examine when choosing a WAN Edge vendor are available in the full report.

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This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Versa.