Multiple Customer Sessions [Main stage/Fireside Chat/Breakouts]

 VS&Co., Booz Allen Hamilton, Enbridge, Exxon, Fiserv, Nordstrom, SLB, and Victor Valley College

Sponsor Showcase

Neeco, Calculus, Lanner, Jabil, Advantech, Dell, Comcast Business, Colt and Riverbed 

Unified SASE Platform to Protect and Connect Users and Devices to Applications Anywhere, Anytime

Kumar Mehta, Founder & CDO

IT leaders are struggling to connect and protect their enterprises by using several products for SD-WAN, SWG, ZTNA, CASB, NGFWaaS and DLP. Such a bolt-on approach weakens security posture due to increased complexity brought about by use of multiple consoles and inconsistent security and network policies. Additionally, it results in increased TCO. According to Gartner, 65% of enterprises will have consolidated individual SASE components by the year 2025. This session will provide the essential blueprint that CIOs/CISOs can use to build a workplace for the next generation hybrid workforce.

Fireside chat with Kumar Mehta – How SASE can Protect, Connect & Simplify

Dr. Daniel Walden, Superintendent/President, Victor Valley College,
Kumar Mehta, Founder & CDO

A candid conversation about how the cybersecurity threat landscape has evolved and what organizations should be doing to protect and connect their users, devices, and sites everywhere to workloads and applications anywhere. Over the last decade, we have seen a rapid migration of applications to the public cloud. We continue to see an increase in cloud adoption as part of the application modernization approaches that organizations are embracing. Additionally, the pandemic has enforced a work-from-anywhere culture, which continues to be a mainstay even in the post-pandemic scenario. Let’s break these problems down to understand how these trends affect security teams and how new technologies such as SASE enable security teams to address these challenges successfully and empower them to modernize their entire network and security infrastructure.

The Calculus of Global Deployments

Verónica Jiménez Pontaza, Telecommunications Master Engineer, Calculus Networks

The global industry of Telecommunications is a very versatile one. The need to adapt to its niches demands an incredible ability to diagnose and customize the best solutions for the client in the shortest of time. This is nothing new, but what if we tell you that there’s quite more to consider when deploying any solution and it has been our winning formula?. In this brief session we will share the best mix that has helped Calculus over the years to become a top integrator globally.

Versa Innovations – Recent & Upcoming

Apurva Mehta, Founder & CTO
Srinivas Dodamani, VP Engineering

Versa continues to innovate rapidly in SD-WAN and Security to address your needs of protecting and connecting users, devices, sites to workloads in any cloud, anytime. This session will provide you highlights of some recent and upcoming innovations the Versa team has been working on to address your evolving needs

Real World Deployment & Operational Experience – Exxon, Nordstrom and Victoria’s Secret &Co.

Yoga Mahadevan, System Architect, Site IT Services, ExxonMobil IT, Malaysia
Eston Stiles, Sr. Infrastructure Manager, Nordstrom
Alex Heidenreich, Sr. Infrastructure Manager, VS&Co

Deploying SD-WAN can be smooth & seamless when done right. There are a lot of moving parts in this journey, including WAN connectivity, branch logistics (power, rack, CPE, onsite person, etc.), provisioning, ZTP, and live traffic cutover. Ensuring a seamless path to “Business critical applications such as POS” is extremely important in this journey. In this session we have a distinguished panel who successfully transformed their multi-vendor legacy network deployments into nimble Versa SD-WAN deployments. This panel will include Eston Stiles from Nordstrom, a luxury retail chain operating in US & Canada and Alex Heidenreich from Victoria’s Secret &Co, a major retail chain with a worldwide footprint and Yogavanam Mahadevan from Exxon. In this session, we will get their insights on how they successfully transformed their networks.

Scale & Simplify Hybrid Multi-Cloud Connectivity While Mitigating Security Risks

Rohan Ravindranath, Global Lead for Multicloud Networking

Digital Transformation has accelerated cloud migration and enterprises have embraced a hybrid/multi-cloud approach to meet their business needs. Beyond transforming applications to be cloud centric, enterprises face new challenges for connecting and securing app-to-app, app-to-site and app-to-user/device. Traditional security approaches can leave businesses exposed to a variety of zero-day exploits, ransomware, and malware. The Cloud Security model today is a shared responsibility model, leading to blind spots in security, application, user, and infrastructure visibility. In this session we will discuss how you can:

• Deliver global network and security segmentation policies across hybrid multi-cloud
• Deploy Cloud workload protection to secure against lateral movement, data exfiltration, ransomware, and malicious activity
• Extend intelligent application segmentation across multi-cloud with predictive insights into cloud spend

Massive IoT: Security Infrastructure for Exponentially Growing IoT Devices

Sunil Ravi, Fellow

Massive IoT refers to the Internet of Things include sensors, smart meters, trackers, wearables, etc., and are being deployed in various industry verticals. The Massive IoT devices pose unique security challenges that need to be addressed early on with scalable security architecture. In this session we will cover the IoT security capabilities in the Versa SSE to meet the growing needs of Massive IoT.

• Differences between IoT, Critical IoT, and Massive IoT
• IoT Security Challenges
• How to securely onboard IoT devices and handle full lifecycle management
• How to continuously monitor and build critical reports that indicate how all data is transacted over your IoT, Cloud and Corporate network so you can respond quickly to violations
• How to use advanced capabilities such as fingerprinting, segmentation, threat prevention, machine learning-based behavior analysis, to dynamically update the risk rating for devices and apply policies based on risk
• How to create a security access policy that prefilters based on the zone, network, interface, APPID, Device ID, etc. to reduce false positives

AIOps to Secure, Simplify, and Automate management and operations for your SD-WAN or SASE Deployment

Sridhar Iyer, Dir Engineering, ML/AI

Versa has innovated a new approach to modernize and simplify your infrastructure by integrating security & networking. Now Versa is enhancing the management and operations of your infrastructure using Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence. Some of these enhancements are evolutionary to maintain familiarity and comfort levels of the end users while others are revolutionary to kickstart a new generation of tools.

Verbo and VANI are new innovations that help you achieve proactive performance monitoring by understanding your data and connecting performance insights with business outcomes.

Observability for Today’s Branch & Hybrid Work Architectures

Roopa Bayar, VP Engineering

Hybrid work & hybrid cloud are forcing a rethink of the network & security architecture for enterprises. In this new environment where users and applications can be anywhere, it is critical for operations to have near real-time visibility for reducing the mean-time-to-innocence, but also have historical insights to track usage patterns across the enterprise footprint for reporting and cost allocation.  ​

In this session, you will learn more about observability capabilities that will proactively identify the root cause of issues related to users, networks, sites and applications. We will also dive into important observability use cases and see how a unified data lake can help provide enhanced user and administrator experience, lower TCO and improve operations agility.

Simplify & Scale a Zero Trust Deployment for Connecting Hybrid Workforce to Hybrid Clouds

Dogu Narin, VP Products
Ramasamy Ramanathan, AVP Engineering

Unlike the last past where users or applications were anchored, today enterprises have to design the infrastructure for a hybrid workforce connecting from anywhere, anytime, to workloads/applications in hybrid clouds. The rise in video concurrency in the workplace has changed traffic patterns and made it challenging to deliver a consistent user experience, plus the influx of personal devices into the enterprise has expanded the attack surface to inside the perimeter. Traditional approaches and architectures are unable to provide a holistic answer to address these challenges. ​

This session will cover how Versa Universal Zero Trust architecture can simplify how you can deliver a consistent user-experience while protecting the enterprises resources for a hybrid workforce that can be remote or on-premises. You will see how this can be easily deployed with minimal disruption to your existing architecture. 

Deploying a Large-Scale SD-WAN Network with Speed and Efficiency

Srinivasa Chaganti, VP Engineering

To realize the benefits of digital transformation, enterprises need to rearchitect their network & security AND accelerate the transition to the new approach.  Enterprises with large scale deployments often struggle with these migrations due to lack of built-in tools, thus prolonging the transition or requiring them to invest time & effort in building adjunct tools that can quickly become obsolete. ​

Enterprises need to accelerate the configuration and deployment of thousands of site/users with a simple portal and automated workflows combined with effortless provisioning.  ​

In this session you will learn how: ​

• A large scale Versa SDWAN network can be deployed and monitored using Concerto​
• Configuration changes can be propagated to thousands of devices with a single click ​
• To Monitor large scale deployment using a unified portal/single pane of glass

Fireside Chat with Tony Fallows – SD-WAN over Satellite to Accelerate Deployment & Improve Network Reliability

Nick Galano, Starlink Sales, SpaceX
Mike Wiper, Network Planning Manager, Enbridge
Tony Fallows, VP, Service Provider Worldwide Sales

Satellite networks offer a viable alternative for primary or failover WAN connectivity to enterprises given the ease and speed of deployment across a wide geographic area. This makes it easy and sometimes the only option in places other connectivity options are not available, such as oil rigs, ships, or extremely remote locations. This panel will include Mike Wiper from Enbridge, an energy infrastructure company that uses satellite networks for pipeline telemetry and communication and Nick Galano from Starlink. In this session, we will discuss when, why and where satellite links are used, how do they fit into an SD-WAN deployment. We will also hear from Starlink about their technology, availability and value proposition.

Flexible Hardware Appliance Options for Versa Solutions

Nikhil Desai, Sr. Dir Products
Haresh Shah, Sr. Dir Hardware Engineering

Versa solutions can be deployed in a variety of physical (bare-metal) or virtual deployments. Today Versa has multiple options, including Versa CSG branded or certified hardware appliances from various partners available for our customers and we are continuing to work with our partners to innovate new devices that can be used to address your needs.  ​

In this session you will hear from Versa experts (and partners) on the current and upcoming options for deploying Versa solutions that scale from 10s of Mbps to 100Gbps for SD-WAN, ZT-LAN and terabits of Ethernet switching capacity for SD-LAN all while running VOS™ to deliver the networking and security you need for the varying deployment environments. 

Secure SD-WAN Operational Excellence Capabilities such as Deploying, Monitoring and Resolving Issues at Scale with Automation

Matthew Lakhov, Sr SE Manager
Naveen Kumar, Dir Engineering

The convergence of networking and security has simplified the infrastructure.  However, the evolution of the workforce and cloud to a hybrid approach requires you to adapt your capabilities to deploy and operate your infrastructure.  In this session, Versa subject matter expert will cover SD-WAN operational excellence capabilities such as deploying, monitoring and resolving issues at scale with automation and Versa Verbo.

How to Deploy, Monitor and Resolve Issues at Scale with Automation in a SASE Deployment

Matthew Lakhov, Sr SE Manager
Naveen Kumar, Dir Engineering

The convergence of networking and security has simplified the infrastructure.  However, the evolution of the workforce and cloud to a hybrid approach requires you to adapt your capabilities to deploy and operate your infrastructure.  In this session, Versa subject matter expert will cover SASE operational excellence capabilities such as deploying, monitoring and resolving issues at scale with automation and Versa Verbo.

Building Secure AWS and Hybrid Global Networks at Scale

Alexandra Huides, Principal Networking Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS

A transition is underway in enterprise networking. Organizations are incorporating new, cloud-native, wide-area networking services into their infrastructure because of their ability to create and configure connectivity on the fly—with elastic capacity and consumption-based pricing. Moreover, this brings the need for a consistent way to connect, secure, and monitor communication between services, at scale, on AWS and in your hybrid network footprint. And Zero Trust requirements are creating additional challenges for network admins, application owners and security teams. In this session, learn how to use with cloud-native networks using the new AWS Cloud WAN and Amazon VPC Lattice services, and how you can use both to architect scalable, global networks, leveraging zero trust principles, and the security integrations you need.

Automating Security and Networking

Using security and network automation for IT efficiency, to minimize human error, improve IT scale, and ‘do the work’ that humans don’t like. This fireside chat will include automation experts Peter Moorey from SLB and Mike Wynston from Fiserv. In this session, we will share automation stories, best practices and take questions from the audience. Peter and Mike are members of the Versa automation community, which meets monthly.

Panel with Martin Mackay –Business Needs & IT Priorities in the Current Climate

The post-pandemic era has evolved further with geopolitical instability and the macroeconomic but business must continue to operate seamlessly. As business priorities evolve, there is a shift in the focus within IT; nevertheless, the need to protect enterprise resources and connect to workloads become even more critical. In this session, we will have a conversation about how IT priorities are evolving and how IT leaders are adjusting to this new normal.

Open Mic with Versa Execs, moderated by Martin Mackay

Martin Mackay, Chief Revenue Officer at Versa Networks, will host a panel of executives from Versa to answer questions submitted in advance and live in the audience.