How and where people work is changing, both now and into the future. And with this pivot to remote work, the way companies are architecting their networks has to change, too, said Aryaka CEO Matt Carter in an interview with SDxCentral.

"We believe where enterprises are going is a cloud-first world, and that's going to require a lot of rearchitecting of networks for companies," he said. "We're gonna live in a binary world. People are gonna work from home, and people are going to be at offices, and so you have to be able to provide a solution that is accommodating for that sort of new world order."

According to Carter, these changes haven't just affected the way people work, but they've also accelerated the adoption of secure access service edge (SASE) platforms.

"We thought it would take a few years before SASE would become more mainstream," he said. "We think that it is fast-tracked because of the pandemic, and we're seeing more and more customers looking for this kind of combination of SD-WAN and security."

Aryaka already has a strong networking stack built on privately owned network infrastructure with distributed points of presence around the globe. However, this could pose a problem for the company, as competing vendors build out their own private networks.

Despite increased competition, Carter isn't the least bit worried. "Aryaka isn't trying to be a niche player," he said.

"You need a private network in some far-flung place in the world? Who are you going to call? You're going to call Aryaka," he said. "But what we've found as we were winning those kinds of deals in the past, customers would ask us if we can also handle this, can you handle that?"

From these conversations, Aryaka executives realized that the company's network was an asset on which a portfolio of technologies could be deployed.

While Aryaka is arguably best known for its private backbone, Carter argues the company's real strength is born from its position as a managed service provider and its proactive customer service.

"Most of the SASE vendors tend to be kind of hands off," he said. "What we're finding, what makes us different, better, special is that customers need a lot of hand-holding. Customers don't like how complex this stuff is. They would prefer to, quite frankly, have someone like us take this on."

As enterprises begin to adopt SASE, Carter sees an opportunity to be a one-stop-shop for customers.

He said where Aryaka has seen its biggest strength with customers has been being able to offer a full suite of networking and security functionality under a single service level agreement (SLA).

"Today, many of them have to deal with different providers, different SLAs, the tracking, the liability, the consistency of all that is daunting," he said. "Our position as a managed service provider, our stellar customer support, are giving our customers a lot of comfort and confidence in our competency to bring all of these pieces together."

This means offering things like last-mile connectivity, virtual private network (VPN) as a service, and security services like firewalls. Much of this is within Aryaka's wheelhouse, particularly where it concerns networking, but security is another story.

"We have a build, buy, and partner strategy in almost everything that we do," explained Shashi Kiran, CMO at Aryaka. "Right now, with regards to security, most of our customers really prefer best of breed brand-name firewalls, and so we've partnered with some of the best in the industry."

To this end, Aryaka announced a partnership with security vendor Check Point in July. Check Point provides the security stack, while Aryaka provides the networking and management component.

While for the moment, Aryaka is content to partner, the company isn't ruling out mergers and acquisitions to fill the void in its SASE stack.

"We'll be looking strategically at certain assets that might make more sense for us," he said. "It will be a continual process of evaluating build, buy, and partner to offer customers choice."