Unlock the future of cybersecurity with the Chief Product Officer at Aryaka Networks, as we explore the revolutionary strides Aryaka has made in the SASE domain. Get ready to be enthralled by Aryaka's metamorphosis from SD-WAN specialists to trailblazers in the Secure Access Service Edge landscape, offering a seamless blend of networking finesse and formidable security. This episode promises to unveil the intricacies of their global private network and their groundbreaking single pass architecture—a game-changer in policy distribution and SSL key management for multi-tenant ecosystems.
Join us on a revealing journey through the transformative enterprise adoption of SASE, where we dissect the delicate interplay between safeguarding digital assets and sustaining peak performance. Our conversation takes us through the three-step onboarding process that enterprises embrace to modernize, optimize, and transform their infrastructure. Drawing from Aryaka's wealth of expertise, discover the full spectrum of service options that they offer, tailored to a variety of operational needs—from fully managed to self-managed. Plus, we shed light on the added perks of network-security integration, such as heightened observability and proactive cyber threat countermeasures. Tune in for an intriguing session that promises not only to fortify your cybersecurity knowledge but also to impress with insights on slashing total ownership costs.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Unlock the future of cybersecurity with the Chief Product Officer at Aryaka Networks, as we explore the revolutionary strides Aryaka has made in the SASE domain. Get ready to be enthralled by Aryaka's metamorphosis from SD-WAN specialists to trailblazers in the Secure Access Service Edge landscape, offering a seamless blend of networking finesse and formidable security. This episode promises to unveil the intricacies of their global private network and their groundbreaking single pass architecture—a game-changer in policy distribution and SSL key management for multi-tenant ecosystems.
Join us on a revealing journey through the transformative enterprise adoption of SASE, where we dissect the delicate interplay between safeguarding digital assets and sustaining peak performance. Our conversation takes us through the three-step onboarding process that enterprises embrace to modernize, optimize, and transform their infrastructure. Drawing from Aryaka's wealth of expertise, discover the full spectrum of service options that they offer, tailored to a variety of operational needs—from fully managed to self-managed. Plus, we shed light on the added perks of network-security integration, such as heightened observability and proactive cyber threat countermeasures. Tune in for an intriguing session that promises not only to fortify your cybersecurity knowledge but also to impress with insights on slashing total ownership costs.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, I am very excited for this chat today with Heraka Networks, a true innovator and disruptor in the SD-WAN and SASE space. With Renuka, chief Product Officer, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great and great to be here, ivan, with you, looking forward to our chat.
Speaker 1:I am as well, and I've been following you guys for many years, started out in SD-WAN, with so much change and disruption happening in that space. Now we're going to talk about the future of cybersecurity as well. Maybe before that, introduce yourself your role at Heraka and your mission within the company.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm Renuka Narkarani. I am the Chief Product Officer at Heraka. When I joined Heraka, my mission was to bring Heraka into the SASE space and build world-class, state-of-the-art architecture that provides integrated networking and security. I have spent 20 plus years in the cybersecurity industry. I have built pretty much every single technology that's out there.
Speaker 2:As a security practitioner, one of my challenges always was how to enforce security across all the different network access and not having network control or access to the network. That was the number one challenge where the security products were always difficult to deploy them. You may have the best security, but if you cannot enforce it, it's actually really not of much use. Heraka was the best opportunity to really truly combine networking and security to provide consistent and ubiquitous security with a very high standard. That was what my mission was At Heraka. I'm responsible for the vision and execution. I have product management, engineering, cloud operations, as well as marketing, where this is really bringing our dream of SASE to life Truly setting up the vision, making sure that we execute to our vision and then we are able to communicate and share with the customers what it is.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's fantastic. What a tour de force introduction to start. This is an important time for you and the team. You've launched your unified SASE as a service, which is a big deal. Talk about where that fits in the landscape of offerings out there in the industry, what the service entails, and it's significant. It's a big deal.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. The vision of the company when we were founded was really to solve the network connectivity at a global level. We wanted to be the best performance, low latency, no packet loss. That was the mission, where we wanted to connect all the users, no matter where they're coming from, to the applications. Interestingly enough, over the course of the period of last decade, we saw so many massive macro trends that, in fact, made that mission even more critical and more useful.
Speaker 2:What we ended up building was a global private network. We think of it as a highway on the internet. It's zero trust by nature, because you can't get on our private network unless we know who you are. As things were evolving as COVID happened, there were remote users, hybrid workforce applications are now in the cloud. In SASE, the enterprises were going through this massive journey of you can call it digital transformation or modernization and that actually played really well in terms of Ariyaka's investments and Ariyaka's journey, as we, along with our customers, not to mention the attack sophistication has been increasing. There are always new attack surfaces and that's why it's not really what security technology that you have it's really. Can you enforce the security at the right place? Can you get it closer to the source, where the actual problems are. I think that's where our focus is.
Speaker 2:What Ariyaka has built, as I say, it's a state of the art architecture. We have a global private backbone. This is zero trust by definition. Then we have overlaid different kinds of security services on top of that. Think of you had a very fast internet highway. Now we are putting checkpoints and cameras on top of it. We do three things for our customers. One is networking, which is the best, fastest performance. The second one is absolutely foolproof security.
Speaker 2:I would just touch upon this because I'm a technologist at heart. One of the fun stuff I saw over the last couple of decades was there were two camps. There were people who did NGFW stateful inspection and then there were people who did proxy, who were like SWG, swig, whatever you call it. Really, when you wanted to do a broad spectrum new Joe's stateful inspection technology and when you wanted to do a specific deep application security, you went down the path of proxy.
Speaker 2:What Ariya Kai is saying is you don't actually have to make that choice, or you don't actually have to split that, because the architecture that we have built is actually we call it one pass architecture, which is, we provide all the networking services from the get go. Those networking services then get into what kinds of access control can you possibly do? User-based, application-based IP? All of that, typically stateful inspection is good enough for that. Then we do SSL decryption, we do post-SSL processing with access control. We do threat protection with IPS, anti-malware, and then of course, in the future we will do data leakage prevention, everything in what we call as process to completion. So process to completion when we get the flow, all of that is actually handled in the single thing.
Speaker 2:So we believe we are very unique from that perspective. There is a single pass architecture out there. But the magic happens when. How do you make sure you have the right policies? How do you make sure that you distribute right SSL keys for SSL decryption? We have hundreds of customers, truly multi-tenant. Our customer has hundreds of sites. How do you make sure the right policies and the right things are deployed at the right place for the security processing? So that's the secret source, which is unified control plane that we have built. So there's a lot of very interesting technology challenges or nuances that we have solved and that makes us truly very unique.
Speaker 2:There's one other last point. I'll mention the third point, which is, as I said, we try to do security closer to the source. When users are coming from the branch office, we can offer the entire spectrum of security to them right at the CPE there. So, unlike most SSE vendors where you take all the traffic to the Cloud for processing, we process it closest to the source and that has many benefits. A it's better security, clearly, because it's closer to the source. You don't know what's going to happen by the time you take it to the Cloud processing. The second thing is it eliminates congestion and performance bottlenecks, because now we are able to perform at a global level at the Cloud, but then, because of the local breakouts, the total amount of traffic that we need to process and the latency that the customers and the users have to handle is much lower. So let me pause. I know I said a lot of different things.
Speaker 1:No, it's fantastic. I know I have a lot of CIO, cso, cto followers and they're really enjoying this content and your enthusiasm is really infectious as well. To describe how does a client, whether it's an enterprise or an MSP, how do they get started on this journey? Typically, there's a lot of technical debt, a lot of legacy out there. You seem to be adding an easy button a bit with the one pass architecture Maybe. Describe how folks are on board and get started.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Actually, a very good question, and if you saw our tagline, one of the things we say is you can get it all. And that's where, typically, when these kinds of decisions are made in the enterprises, there are considerations for should I compromise my security for performance? If I put all the things, you know what will happen. So there are technology considerations and there are trade-offs between performance and security. And then there are operational considerations, which is where you know how do you actually deploy this right, which is you may have multiple teams and there's a change management and you always have to compromise between simplicity how fast can I get things out with less number of approvals and many organizations involved in it versus agility, because you need to go at a speed of business. So what our promise to our customers is, we make sure that they get it all. You can get performance, agility, simplicity and security all of it together. And this is where Ariyanka is very unique, because we meet customers where they are. So when you think about a Sassy journey, when you think about I want to deploy Sassy, where do you even begin? Right? So our customers and this is our experience working with our customers over the last decade where we first recommend you start with modernizing, like you have to. Begin with modernizing your infrastructure, making sure you have access to, you know, the fast networking networking bits and pieces replace MPLS and have global connectivity and basic stuff right, and then you optimize so to your point.
Speaker 2:People already have invested in infrastructure for security. You always have a firewall, you have a quick subscription, so you're not going to drop it and you just use something else. It's just difficult to even practically deploy. So we have about 600 firewalls that Ariyanka manages for our customers, because they were like. I already have these, you know, checkpoint and Palo Alto, and I do truly believe in Sassy. But can I take one step at a time? So we have been managing all these firewalls for our customers.
Speaker 2:We also have something called as Cloud Connector. We have a very large customer and Airlines deal Cathay Pacific that we announced last quarter. They had Microsoft Defender for their CASP and they were like we have done a lot of work in configuration. We want you to work with that. So we have a Cloud Connector and remember, we are actually the network pipe, we are the plumbing, we are the network pipe. So we also do traffic steering. So what we do is we can, you know, deliver the right kinds of security controls within our own infrastructure, but we can also send the traffic in the right way, with right protocols, whatever your configurations might be, to the partner third party products. And then the last stage of their journey we call transform, wherein now you're ready to integrate more services, you are in, you are more comfortable with the way it works, and that's truly transformation, and all along.
Speaker 2:One of the other things that we have built is we can actually fully manage this for our customers. So that's huge help, which is when customers are doing these unknowns and trying to figure out where do I, when begin? Ariaka can fully manage it for the customer. We also understand that some customers want to do it themselves, so we have a portal called as my Ariaka, and all the capabilities that we have built can be self managed by the customer.
Speaker 2:And then we have a third model, just called co managed, which is customers can't get enough of like outsourcing, the networking pieces they are like I don't want to deal with, like different geographies and currencies, and I want to work in Brazil and in, you know, chile and and wherever right, but I don't want to deal with what, the service providers, what is the currency? How am I? What SLAs? So Ariaka is a one stop shop in that sense. But when it comes to the security people as we all all security people are inherently they want to have more control and they need to know exactly what's going on and and, and that's basically where they want to do self service. So what we have is very unique. It's called co managed offering and we can meet customers anywhere on that path.
Speaker 1:Really Wow. That's quite a variety of options. The customer benefits are pretty clear. Sounds like reduced OPEX and reduced CAPEX and reduced network expenses. But what else Is that really the value offering, as it were?
Speaker 2:Yes, there are some very interesting side benefits I'll tell you about. So we had three of our customers over the last six months who were actually subjected to ransomware attack. The connections between they were actually connections between their sites, which ended up becoming we figured it was a lateral movement, but those things were actually allowed by the security controls. So all this traffic was allowed by whatever security mechanism they had. But with Ariyanka we were like we have never seen these things communicate before. What is going on? Why do we see this extra traffic that we are not used to?
Speaker 2:So I think observability is a very interesting side benefit that we get, because the minute you integrate your networking and security stack now, you have so much more information that you did not have before.
Speaker 2:So this kind of observability is super unique and that's really something we can help our customers with as well. And we have a whole data center where we actually capture the flow of the matrix of all the traffic that goes through our cloud. So that's one of the very, very interesting. As we all talk about AI and what we can do, we actually have the. We are very fortunate that we have that access to the data that now we can do interesting things with it. We can share it with our customers and they can take it forward. So that's definitely one thing. Other thing is TCO. We all know about this. Whenever you are streamlining your operations, when you are streamlining the appliances and the network path, there's absolutely lots of TCO benefits. We did a survey of our customers and on an average it's like 30% gains that people see when they adopt SASE and when they integrate networking and security.
Speaker 1:Wow, fabulous opportunity for customers, and you guys were an early first mover in the SD WAN space and, of course, dozens of other companies then followed up and are active there. Now you're innovating in the SASE space. How do you see the landscape in the market and how do you? I know you're not in marketing per se, but how do you see yourself getting the word out and getting those unique advantages you described out to customers?
Speaker 2:So one of our biggest success stories are when our existing customer CIOs they talk about and it's like a lot of our customers are. When they change jobs, they actually take us along with them. That is how we have organically grown. We crossed $100 million organically, and that's something we are super excited about. And then, of course, we need help from these kinds of activities where we actually have audience with people who are technologists, people who are decision makers, people who can actually are strategic, and that's one of our sweet spot.
Speaker 2:When we talk to the CIOs and CSOs and decision makers who are strategic thinkers, they actually always see the value in not only are they changing the networking layer, they are also adding new security to it, which is, in fact, more secure because of lesser attack surfaces and so on and so forth. But really, truly, as I mentioned, the side effect is all about observability, business intelligence, what can we do better? And there are so many benefits, so we have so many stories. As customers adopt public cloud, they find lots of interesting optimization opportunities. As they adopt SaaS, they found a lot of optimization opportunities. So, yeah, so this is exactly what we are hoping to do.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. I know you've just launched many early feedback you can share from experts within the customers or the industry. How's it going?
Speaker 2:It's going great. It's going awesome. We announced it for a GA after we had 40 plus customer conversations and 10 deployments, because we wanted to ensure that our thesis actually holds true when we initially started back in November. Mid-november we actually started telling our story to our customers. Clearly, some of them were our design partners. They were asking us for this for a very long time. Clearly, that was super helpful.
Speaker 2:Some of these are just really simple conversations where certain products are the end of life. They have appliances which need to be replaced. A lot of these conversations were almost like no-brainer from that perspective, because it makes so much sense to add network security and networking. We do have some amazing demos that we are actually doing a security field day where we are going to walk through all our UI.
Speaker 2:One thing I did not touch upon is the way we built our policy model and we had the benefit of doing this all together, unlike accommodating the legacy stuff and then adding on top, because we had the benefit of doing this together. Our policy model is super simplified where, when you provision networking, you can provision all these services in one go, just like you have a one-pass architecture from the data plane. One-pass architecture also applies to when we do the policy model and so on. We have these exciting demos as well, and we will be at RSA in-way. If anybody of you is visiting there, feel free to stop by our booth and take a look at our demo and talk to our teams there.
Speaker 1:I would love to talk more about that. Yes, rsa is a fantastic opportunity to educate and network. You, among others, have responsibility for the forward vision and roadmap. Can you give us a peek? I know there's a lot of proprietary stuff there, but any insight into the future either the industry or where are you at this at it?
Speaker 2:I would say, as I mentioned, we are very excited by the fact that the amount of data that you are able to collect and the ability to instrument this in our CPEs as well as in our POPs. When I started Ariyaka, my first goal was to make us world-class security, make sure that we have all the security capabilities baked into the infrastructure built through and through in our network stack. My second, as I go to the next phase of Ariyaka, where we are heading towards, is really become the best observability and provide the best insights possible to our network in terms of what's going on, where that's definitely going to be the next phase for us. Obviously, we'll use the latest and the greatest technologies. We'll try to get our hands dirty with things like AI technologies and so on. That's absolutely something in our near-term horizon.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. It's hard for companies to change and adopt the latest technologies. They have a lot of legacy and technical debt, organizational challenges. How should folks get started, either with you directly or with partners? Do you have a baby step or one, two, three first steps to move into this new world of SASE and observability?
Speaker 2:Yes, we have three steps that we have aligned. We talk about modernized and then optimized and then transformed. We are a channel first company. We have actually very close relationships with most of the top channel technology trusted advisors. In fact, I was in Vegas last couple of days. We were at CP Expo where we met our largest channel partners. We are actually training their SASEs. They are the trusted advisors to a lot of companies. They definitely play a significant role in hand-holding the customer, giving them the right guidance, chalking out multiple different steps that you need to take as you get through the SASE journey.
Speaker 1:Well, it's such an exciting journey and the value is so evident. What are you excited about? You mentioned RSA over the next couple of months. What are you excited about, travel-wise, professionally, personally, what's on your radar?
Speaker 2:Next week I'm actually heading to our Bangalore office and to celebrate our SASE launch with the extended team. Then we have some very exciting news that we will be sharing in April, taking the step forward in terms of the deployments that I just talked about. We started with 40 customers and then we had some of them deployed and now some of them are at a point where they are in production. So in April we are looking to bring in our customers who are already in production, as well as some of our partners that I talked about, who are our channel partners. So we'll have some very exciting announcements happening there, but that's really what we are looking forward to.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on all that and thanks so much for spending the time here Really intriguing, interesting, insightful conversation and thanks everyone for watching. Reach out to Yorakha for more info, comments, questions. Thanks so much, Radhuka.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Yaman.
Speaker 1:Okay, take care everyone, bye-bye.