The rapid shift to remote work following the onset of the pandemic early this year helped to accelerate Versa Network’s SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) platforms in a new market: the home, said CMO Mike Wood in an interview with SDxCentral.

Wood claims the pandemic drove a 100-fold increase in home use of either its SD-WAN or SASE platforms since the beginning of the year. And while Wood didn’t disclose raw numbers, Gartner estimates that Versa had more than 5,000 global SD-WAN customers by the end of September 2020. Additionally Gartner reports that Versa has managed to outpace the rest of the market.

And further bolstering the claim, Wood boasted that more than 200 Tb/s of traffic is now flowing from home offices through its SASE points of presence (PoPs). “Quite honestly most of it has been driven by the pandemic. There is no question about that,” he said. “If 2020 had been a normal year we certainly don’t think there would have been a 100x increase.”

The company claims much of its success is thanks to its strong partner network of managed service providers and telecoms of which the company counts more than a 120. Versa worked with each of these partners to develop work-from-home focused offerings to address the needs of remote workers.

But beyond channel partners, Versa’s timing also played a role in its success in the home office, explained Wood. The company kicked off the year by launching its CSG 300 series SD-WAN appliances. The small form factor appliances are roughly the size of a commercial wireless router. Then, in early June the company announced its entrance into the emerging SASE market with the launch of Versa Secure Access.

The Gartner coined product category attempts to stitch together traditional SD-WAN overlays with managed security and edge compute into a single cloud-delivered package. Since the product category was first detailed in Gartner’s 2019 hype cycle report, essentially every major SD-WAN and security vendor announced plans to transition to a SASE architecture.

Versa Secure Access enables customers to take advantage of cloud-based routing and security functionality without needing to deploy and manage an appliance in the home. Instead the service is deployed as an endpoint client running on the user’s computer or mobile device. From there traffic is routed from the device through either Versa’s own SASE PoP or a service provider owned PoP, where policy can be applied at an individual level based on factors like user identity, location and the device being used.

While Versa has been able to capitalize on the rapid and potentially permanent shift to remote work. Wood explains that despite SASE's low barrier to entry, the company’s SD-WAN appliances remain popular, even in the home.

Instead, he called Versa’s Secure Access SASE platform a “force multiplier” for the company enabling it to address the needs of large numbers of customers in a very short period of time. He added that Versa has seen three remote work strategies taken by its customers.

The first is to deploy a small SD-WAN appliance to the home, which in addition to SD-WAN, routing and quality of service, also provides hardware-level security to the home network. Without naming the company, he described a financial services company that had deployed SD-WAN appliances to its employees homes to provide secure access to trading tools running on-premises. In the second strategy, customers have deployed Versa’s SASE platform.

Finally, Wood said, some companies have opted for a combination of both SD-WAN appliances and the SASE agent. For employees that need advanced security functionality or more robust routing features like quality of service, an SD-WAN appliance is deployed. Meanwhile, customers that just need access to company resources running in the cloud or corporate data center use Versa’s Secure Access platform.

Once a vaccine becomes readily available, Wood doesn’t expect a flood of employees heading back to the office.

Instead, he expects the transition to remote work will be a permanent one for many employees, while for others a hybrid approach where the employee is working remotely at least part of the week may be used.

“For me to have a work from home sale, I just need your employee to work a portion of the time at home,” he said. “They don’t have to be there all the time, and I think that probably 50% or more of employees will be working at least a portion of the time at home.”