Versa Networks, the leader in SASE, today announced that the MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept (PoC) Showcase Q1 2021 demonstration it participated in – “Secured Work from Anywhere using SASE Service and Lean NFV” – won the MEF 3.0 PoC Business Impact Award from MEF earlier this month.
The MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept Showcase Q1 2021 awards recognize leadership and innovation in support of the MEF 3.0 Global Services Framework and the broader industry. According to MEF, the Business Impact Award recognizes the most significant potential impact on the service provider’s business. The MEF 3.0 PoC Showcase Awards judging panel included analysts from Atlantic ACM, AvidThink, Dell’Oro Group, Omdia, TeleGeography, and Vertical Systems Group.
“This PoC demonstrates end-to-end SASE service layered on multiple SD-WANs with distributed security, orchestrated using principles of Lean NFV for greater openness, agility, disaggregation, and service innovation at the edge. SASE Service is established, secured, and driven by common policies over customer, service provider, security cloud, and public cloud domains. As a result, the end customer receives policy-driven, zero-trust access to multiple public cloud providers,” said Daniel Bar-Lev, VP Strategic Programs, MEF.
Versa SASE delivers tightly integrated SASE via the cloud, on-premises, or as a blended combination of both via Versa Operating System (VOS™) with a Single-Pass Parallel Processing architecture. Versa began delivering SASE services such as VPN, Secure SD-WAN, Edge Compute Protection, NGFW, Next Generation-Firewall as a Service, SWG, and Zero Trust Network Access 5 years ago. Versa uniquely provides contextual security based on user, role, device, application, location, security posture of the device, and content. As the leader in the rapidly growing SASE market, Versa is the only solution proven to deliver the industry’s leading and differentiated architecture for high performance and security. Gartner recently identified Versa SASE as having the most SASE components out of all 56 vendors Gartner evaluated.
The MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept Program encourages collaborative work within MEF, where members partner to demonstrate use cases based on current and developing standards. The showcase featured 18 companies joining forces in seven demonstrations over seven days.
“Versa Networks has been an active member and contributor to MEF for years, and we were pleased to participate in the MEF 3.0 PoC Showcase with our industry-leading SASE technology,” said Michael Wood, Chief Marketing Officer for Versa Networks. “Versa SASE continues to be recognized as the leading SASE solution for secure networking and remote access, due to its ability to combine a fully integrated robust set of SASE services within one operating system software stack using a single-pass parallel processing architecture. The MEF showcase demonstrated an outstanding level of collaboration and innovation, and the PoCs showed how MEF 3.0-based SASE, among other technologies, can be leveraged to transform user experiences.”
Competing solutions to Versa have hidden costs and gaps in security because they require multiple product, cloud, and service components. Achieving visibility and control from solutions requiring service chaining to connect multiple components together proves ineffective, increasing the costs and attack surfaces for organizations. Versa ACE Partners are uniquely able to offer a cost-effective and simple-to-quote Versa SASE solution rather than stitching together multiple vendors to achieve a single SASE solution.
Versa SASE runs on VOS, which is designed with the Versa Single-Pass Parallel Processing architecture combining extensive security, advanced networking, industry leading SD-WAN, genuine multitenancy, and sophisticated analytics into one software image. This integration and design methodology dramatically decreases latency, significantly improves performance, and mitigates security vulnerabilities which other solutions introduce by running multiple software stacks, service chains, or appliances.