SASE can save your company a lot of money. Use the industry’s-first SASE ROI calculator to quantify the cost savings you can achieve in services, asset consolidation, and labor when deploying Versa SASE.
A large, publicly traded energy company operating in all areas of the oil and gas industry has dramatically simplified their network stack and realized huge cost savings with Versa SASE.
EMA evaluates the different SASE vendors and their approaches to architecture, go-to-market, and support for their cloud-delivered and hybrid services.
SASE is the simplest, most scalable way to continuously secure and connect the millions points of access in and out of the corporate resources regardless of location.
Sr. Systems Engineer. Versa Networks
November 2, 2023
In recent years we’ve witnessed transformative changes in both technology and the retail industry. The retail world has seen tremendous ups and downs over the past several years thanks to the impact of COVID. In addition to challenges such as store closures, reduced foot traffic, and supply chain problems, digital disruptions include an increasing shift to e-commerce and new types of cyber threats that have dramatically changed how people shop and how retail businesses should operate. In the technology world, numerous stunning innovations such as AI/ML-assisted network operations and threat detection are making people’s jaws drop because of their capabilities and efficiencies.
Among the many reasons that retail CTOs and CIOs are attracted to SD-WANs for network modernization, there are two characteristics that make them particularly important for the industry:
They provide an intelligent WAN network that improves the customer experience and retail operations efficiency at the same time.
They provide robust security that can be rapidly deployed at scale to distributed store, warehouse, and other locations.
Market studies for secure software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) show that demand is increasing globally as organizations aim to address security concerns and enhance the employee and customer experience. Frost & Sullivan predicts that the global secure SD-WAN solutions market will grow from $1.67 billion in 2021 to $6.52 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.3%[link].
What an intelligent WAN can do for you
An intelligent SD-WAN offers much more than just using a broadband link to set up an IPSec tunnel or get your lease line circuit connected. If that weren’t the case, a router from 20 years ago could easily fill the need at a much lower cost. A modern SD-WAN network delivered by newer technology such as the Versa Operating System (VOS™), a cloud-native software stack with a full set of networking capabilities, has many new angles and possibilities compared to legacy networking. To name a few:
SaaS optimization for day-to-day store operations,
WAN conditioning (FEC and Packet Replication) for business-critical traffic,
a “cold standby” cellular connection that never incurs cost unless all wired circuits are down, and
a multi-tenancy-ready infrastructure for brand acquisition.
These technologies directly benefit retail store operations and improve the customer experience. With this approach, corporate and customer traffic can always be segmented, with each segment assuming its own application optimization policies as needed.
When network outages happen (we all know outages happen at surprising times, such as weekends), WAN conditioning and standby cellular are conditionally enabled to make sure POS transactions always go through (as high-priority traffic). Having a real-time monitoring capability that presents all the live data in a dashboard (Figure 1) is also a critical feature to help a retail operator understand if any given store traffic deviates too much from baseline.
Figure 1 – Versa real-time monitoring dashboard showing live traffic utilization from a specific store.
Protection against cyberthreats with built-in security
According to a survey of CIOs last year by CIO Magazine, 94% of enterprises say their adoption of SASE (essentially SD-WAN + SSE security) solutions has accelerated due to the need to make digital services and remote/hybrid work sustainable for the long term. Versa Unified SASE with SD-WAN comes with built-in security that effectively prevents unauthorized access from Internet and intranet in a cost-effective way. Security feature sets delivered by Unified SASE provide many key components required for enterprise cybersecurity protection, including zone-based protection, denial-of-service detection and mitigation, stateful firewall, next-generation firewall, zero trust network access (ZTNA), data loss prevention (DLP), next-generation anti-malware (NGAM), and intrusion prevention (IPS).
VOS, which provides fundamental components of the Versa security stack, protects against known and unknown threats. And with genuine multi-tenancy and template-based provisioning, various functions of the security umbrella can be enabled individually, while consistency across the entire network is maintained via a single click pushing security templates and policies to all the management nodes.
For detected threats and incidents, an enterprise is also provided with a comprehensive dashboard or report (Figure 2) to determine the root cause and take remediation steps accordingly.
Figure 2 – Versa Analytics security threat report
Summary
It’s no secret that retail is a highly competitive industry, and no business can afford losing reputation through a sub-optimal shopping experience or by being a victim of cyber threats. Thankfully, picking an industry-leading SD-WAN solution that carries the above-mentioned features is a strong step towards addressing these concerns. Don’t be put off by some of the technology buzz words, a modern SD-WAN should never be complicated to provision and manage, and it will be an excellent solution if it offers one pane of glass for daily operation. SD-WAN solutions like Versa also offer flexible consumption models: customer-hosted and managed, Versa-hosted and managed, or co-hosted and managed.
Contact us today and check out how Versa Secure SD-WAN helps our customers increase operational efficiency. Visit us at: https://versa-networks.com/contact/.
