Aryaka Unveils ‘Biggest Innovation’ In Company’s History: Unified SASE As A Service

‘This is Nirvana for these companies to have this unified platform. It’s been talked about for many years and now it’s actually coming to market, so there’s a high level of excitement and there’s a high level of interest for unified SASE,’ says Craig Patterson, Aryaka’s channel chief.

SASE specialist Aryaka is launching what the company is calling the first unified single-pass architecture that combines its own global private network backbone, security, observability and application performance capabilities, all-in-one platform and delivered as a service.

Aryaka Unified SASE as a Service is sparking excitement with early adopters and interest from the company’s global channel partner base, Aryaka’s Senior Vice President of Global Channel Sales Craig Patterson told CRN.

“I think it’s the biggest innovation Aryaka has had since we began,” Patterson said. “This is a major transformational moment in our history where we’re now going from being known as one of the leaders in the SD-WAN space to becoming a leader in the unified SASE space and it’s going to create an unbelievable value proposition for customers because most of these other vendors out there aren’t doing thing the way we are in this unified manner.”

Aryaka’s Unified SASE as a Service elements include the company’s OnePass Architecture for distributed policy enforcement through a distributed data plane, unified control plane and single management pane; Aryaka’s Zero Trust WAN that runs on the company’s private network backbone that operates in more than 100 countries; and networking, security and observability services, including Aryaka’s SmartSecure next-generation firewall with secure web gateway, anti-malware and intrusion prevention system, according to the San Mateo, Calif.-based company.

“Simply put, this new offering truly unifies the networking and cyber space onto one single, unified pane of glass,” said Patterson (pictured). “Within that security architecture, there are going to be features and functionalities such as secure web gateway, next generation firewall, anti-malware -- all the things that the majority of the market is looking from the SASE perspective.”

Compared to competing SASE offerings on the market, when a new security feature from a third party is introduced, the packet has to be analyzed multiple times and it has to leave the architecture, which creates latency and delay, Patterson said.

“Here, we’re looking at that packet one time and we’re going to make routing decisions and security decisions based upon that one single pass of that architecture,” he said.

The offering lets customers choose between a managed, co-managed or self-managed model with the help of the company’s more than 2,000 global agent, VAR, and MSP partners.

Patterson and his team are the most excited about the opportunity that the latest product launch presents to the channel community.

“There’s a lot of companies out there that have different offerings in the SASE space. The thing I love the most is that we are very flexible. We’re truly allowing the channel community to engage with their customers and meet their customers and where they are within the SASE or cyber journey,” he said.

The new Unified SASE-as-a-Service offering gives customers a modern architecture for SASE that lets them hold onto existing investments they have in security products from the likes of Palo Alto Networks or Checkpoint, he said.

The offering can slowly migrate customers into a more modern architecture or move into the complete unified approach, Patterson said.

“It’s very flexible and accommodates all customers. It’s not: ‘Buy it all or buy nothing.’” he said.

Aryaka has targeted a handful of customers and partners fbiggesor its Early Access Program for the new offering and feedback has been exciting, Patterson added.

“This is Nirvana for these companies to have this unified platform. It’s been talked about for many years and now it’s actually coming to market, so there’s a high level of excitement and there’s a high level of interest for unified SASE,” he said.

Aryaka counts many large, global enterprises and S&P 500 companies as customers, including Nvidia, SAP, and Cathay Pacific.

Aryaka last month brought on former Google Cloud Vice President Shailesh Shukla as its CEO and chairman as the company gears up for peaking interest in SASE as customers face increasingly complex application environments and geographically dispersed workforces.