Aryaka rolls out cloud-based web gateway for SASE-focused WAN offering

Long-time WAN provider Aryaka today released a version of its Zero Trust WAN product that incorporates a new Secure Web Gateway and Firewall-as-a-Service as it works toward a SASE-enabled WAN offering.

The idea is to provide a much more updated version of WAN to enterprise customers-– where SD-WAN traditionally lived in a box in branch offices, the pandemic and the evolving SASE model prompted a more flexible rethink. Now, Aryaka’s latest model is an entirely cloud-based offering, routing secure traffic to branch offices or remote employees while being able to employ robust security technologies via Aryaka’s own cloud.

“It’s a great big black box,” said IDC research director Chris Rodriguez. “You’re going to abstract away all the traditional security stacks.”

SASE incorporates security into SD-WAN

SASE, or secure access service edge, is a Gartner Research-coined term that’s been around since 2019. It describes an SD-WAN offering with security features like identity management, policy enforcement, and device health monitoring built-in—and one that can also be delivered via the cloud, rather than requiring an appliance. It’s a popular idea among vendors, given its ability to scale readily based on usage.

It’s become a widespread buzzword in the networking sector, with vendors using it to describe any kind of cloud-based, multiuse security product, even if it doesn’t meet Gartner’s fairly strict definition for true SASE.

“It’s been so hard for anyone to fulfill the full concept of SASE—it’s a lot!” said Rodriguez. “Aryaka’s taking more of an approach where they’re trying to integrate best-of-breed.”

The same is true for zero trust, which Aryaka uses to describe a wide range of its offerings, including the new Secure Web Gateway. According to Forrester Research, which first described the term, it means that systems should be architected in such a way as to grant the minimum amount of access to any entity or given piece of data at any given time.

According to Rodrigue, Aryaka is handling some of the foundational security functionality and policy by itself, but leaving open the option for users to address more parts of the SASE equation—like cloud access security broker technology, and intrusion prevention—themselves.

Aryaka’s Secure Web Gateway, the company said, is designed as a defense for both site-to-internet and user-to-internet traffic. The company highlights benefits like reduced operational complexity, easier patching and updating for security components, correlated viewing of different security systems during the same events, and lower overall TCO, thanks to the centralized management and tight integration between disparate parts of the security equation.

It’s likely to appeal most heavily to companies that are large enough to have separate teams for networking and security, but not so large that their security and networking teams have inordinately complicated in-house technology, according to IDC’s Rodriguez.

“I do think it’s been traditionally a smaller enterprise/midmarket [play,]” he said. “This will help bridge those gaps [between security and networking.]” Particularly large companies, by contrast, might have stricter requirements and more complex systems that couldn’t be replaced on a turnkey basis by Aryaka’s SASE offering.

The secure web gateway is available now as part of Aryaka’s Zero Trust WAN offering, which is priced on a per-site or per-user basis.