Product & Engineering

Building Operational Resilience in SSE: How Versa Networks Delivers Business Continuity at Scale 

The Challenge: SSE in the Critical Path

As enterprises embrace hybrid work and cloud-first strategies, Unified SASE’s Security Service Edge (SSE) features have become the backbone of secure connectivity. SSE unifies key capabilities — such as secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), zero trust network access (ZTNA), and data loss prevention (DLP) — into a single, cloud-delivered architecture.

However, this consolidation introduces a new challenge: SSE sits squarely in the critical path between users and applications. When your SSE provider experiences latency, a regional outage, or configuration failure, your workforce feels the pain instantly. As Gartner notes in its Addressing Operational Resilience in SSE Deployments, SSE “creates a concentration risk” that can threaten operations when not managed effectively. For CISOs and cybersecurity managers, this raises a crucial question: How do you ensure operational continuity when your security fabric itself is cloud-delivered?

Versa Networks answers that question by embedding operational resilience directly into its platform design — enabling organizations to maintain control, visibility, and continuity even when the unexpected occurs.

Beyond SLAs: Engineering for Continuity

Many organizations still view Service Level Agreements (SLAs) as their safety net for cloud reliability. But as Gartner emphasizes, SLAs are financial constructs, not technical safeguards. Service credits after an outage don’t keep your business running during an incident.

Versa’s approach to operational resilience starts where SLAs end. Its architecture is built on distributed control, local enforcement, and continuous failover, ensuring that essential functions remain available even during transient service disruptions. Key resilience mechanisms in Versa’s architecture include the following designs:

• Versa separates its management/orchestration, control, and data planes to ensure resilient and secure operations.
  • Management Plane: Provides configuration management, policy orchestration, multi-tenant administration, and comprehensive monitoring, logging, and analytics through Versa Director and Analytics.
  • Control Plane: Handles routing intelligence and distributes policies using controllers.
  • Data Plane: Performs real-time packet forwarding and security enforcement.

This separation ensures that data-plane traffic continues to flow securely even if connectivity to the cloud-based management or control components is disrupted.

• Local enforcement nodes: Versa Secure Access and Secure Web Gateway functions operate directly at the branch, edge, or endpoint, ensuring that policy enforcement continues even without connectivity to a centralized cloud POP. This is enabled by Versa’s architectural approach:
  • Microservices-based security services provide deep inspection and offline analysis — including threat-intelligence correlation, advanced malware sandboxing, behavioral analytics, and forensics — all running as independently scalable components.
  • Inline enforcement through the Versa Operating System (VOS) delivers real-time inspection at wire speed, with an integrated packet-processing engine executing NGFW, IPS, URL filtering, SSL inspection, and application identification simultaneously, without the latency of traffic redirection.
• Elastic, multi-cloud deployment: Versa SSE can be deployed across multiple cloud regions and providers, leveraging redundant points of presence (PoPs) to maintain user access during localized outages.

By designing for operational independence rather than central dependence, Versa ensures your organization can degrade gracefully instead of failing catastrophically.

Planning for Real-World Failure Scenarios

According to Gartner, security and risk leaders should plan for short-term failures, not rare catastrophic events. Most SSE outages are transient — minutes or hours — not days. Yet even short disruptions can halt workflows, break user trust, and damage compliance posture.

Versa’s operational philosophy aligns precisely with this guidance. The platform provides tiered resilience strategies that match the probability and impact of different failure scenarios:

Failure Scenario	Versa Resilience Strategy
Cloud POP outage	Automatic rerouting to nearest available POP using intelligent global load balancing
Control plane unavailability	Local policy enforcement continues with cached configuration and distributed decision-making
Edge appliance or site disconnection	Direct-to-cloud fallback via Versa Secure Access clients
Configuration corruption or change error	Versioned configuration snapshots and rollback support

With Versa, resilience isn’t a patch or add-on — it’s an intrinsic property of the platform.

Testing and Exercising Continuity Plans

Gartner recommends that organizations conduct tabletop exercises and simulated failures to validate their response to SSE disruptions. Versa facilitates this operational discipline by giving CISOs and security teams the observability, analytics, and testing tools needed to measure readiness.

Versa’s Tools for Continuity Testing

1. Versa Management and Analytics: Provides a unified management console where administrators can simulate configuration changes, observe failover behavior, and measure latency impacts in real time.
2. Resilience simulation workflows: Security teams can intentionally disable a site or POP to verify that fallback mechanisms (such as local breakout or alternate PoPs) perform as expected.
3. Business-impact mapping: With Versa’s AI-driven visibility, CISOs can map which business processes or applications would be most affected by specific SSE components failing — mirroring Gartner’s recommendation to identify “the most impactful business disruptions and associated provider failure modes”

Through continuous validation, organizations turn resilience from a theoretical framework into an operational muscle.

Avoiding Complexity: Why Versa Doesn’t Need a “Warm-Spare” Provider

Some organizations consider maintaining a secondary SSE vendor as a backup. Gartner cautions that this approach adds complexity and administrative overhead, often outweighing its benefits. Configurations drift, user experience degrades, and cost doubles without proportional resilience gains.

Versa eliminates the need for a redundant provider by embedding multi-tenancy, segmentation, and redundancy within a single, cohesive platform. With:

• Multi-region high availability ensuring service continuity
• Multi-tenant segmentation preserving operational independence across business units
• Built-in policy and configuration sync across regions

Versa provides the resilience of a multi-provider strategy without the operational overhead. Versa’s architectural approach of microservices-based architecture for deep security inspection and offline analysis – threat intelligence correlation, advanced malware sandboxing, behavioral analytics, and forensics operate as independent scalable services.

Inline architecture through VOS (Versa Operating System) for real-time inspection – integrated packet processing engine performing simultaneous NGFW, IPS, URL filtering, SSL inspection, and application identification at wire speed without traffic redirection latency.

Deployment Flexibility: Public, Private / Sovereign, or Managed Hybrid

Operational resilience depends not just on how your SSE is architected, but also where and how it is deployed. Versa uniquely enables organizations to deploy the same security and networking stack in multiple models, ensuring regulatory compliance, data sovereignty, and operational control — without sacrificing functionality.

Public Cloud Deployment

Ideal for global enterprises seeking agility and scalability, Versa’s cloud-delivered SSE leverages a globally distributed infrastructure with hundreds of points of presence. Traffic automatically routes through the nearest node for low latency, while centralized analytics ensure unified visibility.

Private / Sovereign Deployment

For organizations with strict sovereignty, compliance, or data residency mandates — such as those in government, defense, or financial sectors — Versa offers a fully private or sovereign deployment option. Enterprises can host the SSE control and data planes in their own infrastructure or within a designated sovereign cloud. This model ensures full ownership of encryption keys, configuration data, and operational control while maintaining feature parity with Versa’s public SSE service.

Managed / Hybrid Deployment

Versa’s hybrid managed model allows organizations to combine the best of both worlds — leveraging Versa’s managed SSE backbone while retaining private control of select data planes or regions. This approach simplifies operations for distributed enterprises, offering the assurance of managed reliability with the flexibility of enterprise oversight.

Across all models, Versa ensures policy consistency, unified visibility, and seamless user experience. Whether your SSE operates from Versa’s global cloud, your own data center, or a sovereign environment, it behaves as one cohesive fabric — a critical enabler of business continuity and compliance at scale.

Multiple Resilience Options — Built In

Gartner advises choosing SSE providers that offer “multiple options for handling data traffic to reduce the impact of cloud outages or disruptions”

Localized Enforcement, Global Continuity

Versa’s hybrid deployment options make it possible to run localized enforcement while maintaining global continuity. If a cloud POP experiences latency, traffic can continue to flow through Versa CSGs (Customer Security Gateways) deployed on-prem or via Versa Secure Access clients on endpoints.

The result: users maintain secure access to critical resources — even during partial cloud failures — without compromising on inspection, logging, or compliance.

Fail-Open and Fail-Closed Granularity

Versa empowers organizations to decide how specific traffic behaves under duress:

• Fail-open: Non-sensitive traffic (e.g., SaaS apps like collaboration tools) continues to flow during an outage.
• Fail-closed: Sensitive or private applications (e.g., ERP, finance systems) remain blocked until inspection resumes.

This aligns directly with Gartner’s guidance to differentiate between “applications that can fail open versus those that must fail closed”

Business Continuity Through Unified Visibility

Operational resilience isn’t only about avoiding downtime — it’s about maintaining trust, compliance, and user experience during unexpected events. Versa’s unified analytics platform offers end-to-end visibility across users, devices, and applications — from branch edge to cloud to endpoint.

With Versa Analytics and Versa Concerto, CISOs can:

• Monitor performance across all SSE components in real time
• Detect early warning signals of potential service degradation
• Automatically generate incident timelines and RCA reports for governance and audits

By consolidating observability into a single pane of glass, Versa reduces the time to diagnose, respond, and recover — the very metrics that define operational continuity.

Operational Resilience as a Core SSE Capability

The modern enterprise no longer differentiates between security resilience and business resilience — they are one and the same. SSE is now a mission-critical service, and outages can have direct revenue and reputational impact.

Versa’s Secure Service Edge platform is engineered with that reality in mind. It offers:

• Distributed, resilient architecture that keeps traffic flowing
• Flexible deployment models — public, private/sovereign, or managed hybrid — to meet operational and regulatory needs
• Continuous testing and validation capabilities that build organizational readiness
• Granular control and observability to manage fail-open/closed behavior
• Unified management and analytics for faster recovery and smarter decisions

For CISOs and cybersecurity managers, Versa provides not just a secure edge — but a continuously operational one. In an era where “security downtime” equals “business downtime,” Versa ensures your security fabric remains as resilient as your organization’s ambitions.