This past week was the inaugural conference for Versa Networks – celebrating both product innovations this past year as well as key customer stories. Versa global customers came onto the virtual big stage to discuss how they were able to reap tremendous benefits from switching to Versa. Versa engineering leaders showcased the new and exciting features that are available with Versa SASE using hands-on, live demonstrations within the Versa management console. The first half of each day was led by keynote speakers and the second half was divided between two compelling breakout tracks running in parallel. The Versatility 2022 conference provided insightful and diverse technical education for nearly 1000 registered Versa partners and customers around the world.
Key themes discussed during the two-day conference made a profound impact on the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market. Here is a recap of the top discussions at Versatility bound to make waves in 2022 and beyond:
Whether you are using Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle, Alibaba Cloud, or a combination of all the above plus your own on-premises servers, it is increasingly difficult to get visibility and control of your multi-cloud infrastructure. Rohan Ravindranath, Principal Solutions Architect, and Murali G D, Principal Engineer, presented how it is difficult to unify cloud network and security management because of the limitations across different 3rd party cloud platforms. In their session, they showed the importance of interoperability by leveraging SDKs and RESTful API’s to be able to build, change, and version control the entire multi-cloud infrastructure through a single workflow.
Suraj Chandrasekaran, Director of Sales Engineering, and Srinivas Dodamani, Head of Engineering, India, discussed how critical it is to gain control of your data in the multi-cloud through SASE. In their session, they stressed the importance of hierarchical multi-tenancy and granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) as fundamentals to understanding what your users are doing, anytime, anywhere.
The great “Skills Shortage” affects security and IT practitioners the most as they need to do more projects with less staff. In an age where attack sophistication is growing but talent is shrinking, automation needs to be embedded into every security management console. Srinivasa Chaganti, Senior Director of Engineering, and Ankitha Shetty, Software Engineer, revealed the automation enhancements for Versa Concerto that allows for a scalable architecture; giving Enterprise networks the support needed to manage tens of thousands of CPEs. In their session, they demonstrated how easy it is to configure SASE policies and automate the lifecycle for deployments.
To make it even easier for IT practitioners, Sridhar Iyer, Director of Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, discussed how Versa introduced VANI (Versa Advanced Networks Insights) and Verbo (Versa’s AI chatbot) to allow for anomaly detection and network debugging. Triangulating the analytics server, the Versa AI bot, and the ML on the devices produces a fully self-healing loop that requires almost no manual network management.
For 5G networks, Chitresh Yadev, Global Head of Sales Engineering, and Kulin Shah, Systems Engineer, presented all the ways organizations can extend private networks to mobile and IoT devices to enable secure work-from-home or smart device connectivity. In their session, they also demonstrated how network slicing for 5G infrastructure can offer optimal security and routing policy for each slice based on user, device, and context. Versa Analytics is a core component of all Versa networking and security services.
In Versa’s own Director of Engineering Roopa Bayer’s session, she reviewed why it was critical to combine tenant-level data at regional clusters for visibility for security forensics and why multiple regional clusters are required for scale, security, and compliance. With all the data available in Versa’s security forensics visualized through Versa Director, it is easy to get visibility into sites and users affected, the applications they are using, their location, and how to remediate any risk.
In the breakout sessions led by Versa software engineer Akshay Adhikari, optimal end-to-end path selection is required for delivering a consistent and predictable application performance. Akshay discussed why it is critical for organizations to get deep visibility into the network applications and make real-time decisions on the applications. By doing so, organizations can ensure the best user experience and an encrypted and secure transfer of sensitive data.
Bhavesh Mistry, Principal Software Engineer, and Naveen Kumar, QA Engineer, dived into how Versa can provide application steering templates for any IT team to both enable optimal user experience while meeting the most stringent SLAs and security requirements. In short, path selection is not limited to just delivering an optimal user experience but is a requirement for delivering a secure user experience when accessing applications. An optimized user experience means there is less friction for the user to leverage non-sanctioned applications and fewer workflow gaps for attackers to exploit.
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See you next year at Versatility 2023!