Aryaka is expanding on its goal to build a “zero-trust WAN” with the addition of secure web gateway-as-a-service (SWGaaS), a line of defense for site-to-internet and user-to-internet traffic. 

Combined with the vendor’s firewall-as-a-service (FaaS), the secure web gateway (SWG) enables features such as patch and update readiness, Uniform Resource Locator category filtering, antivirus and malware scanning, and user identification and control. 

Sean Kaine, Aryaka’s director of marketing, told SDxCentral the launch of the SWG marks another step forward on the company’s roadmap for unified secure access service edge (SASE) – Gartner’s term for a single platform with converged networking and security. 

Dell’Oro Group’s Network Security Market report initially named Versa, VMware, and Cato as the only vendors offering a truly “unified SASE” platform, with Aryaka added to that list in July.

Kaine clarified the vendor's SWG isn’t considered a standalone solution, and Aryaka is not looking to “go head to head with secure web gateway providers.”

He said the benefit of adding a SWG to the company’s zero-trust WAN fabric is the “integration within the network, to be able to just turn this on and be able to minimize the number of providers that you have and still have the core functionality that you need – and managed centrally from one control.”

According to Aryaka’s sixth-annual State of the WAN report released early this year, the pandemic has fundamentally changed the way Enterprise WANs are architected. 

From a security perspective, Kaine said Aryaka sees zero trust as the only right approach. “There's no trust sometimes, it's a zero-trust approach,” he added. “That is the way to apply security and we're applying that security into the network.” 

Additionally, Kaine said as the network extends, vendors need to broaden how enterprises engage with data in the cloud. “We really envisioned delivering SASE by applying zero trust to the WAN and then extending WAN, outside of just what we thought of as the WAN, to the cloud,” he explained. “So the WAN is everything.”

Kaine contended that networking companies like Aryaka are better positioned to pursue SASE than security companies – like those offering standalone security services edge (SSE) products as a component of SASE – because they have been working on networking infrastructure for years. 

Backing this up, analyst firm Gartner told SDxCentral the start of the unified SASE trend is indeed coming mainly from SD-WAN vendors. But Gartner's analyst also said “the security SSE vendors are reacting now,” so that might not be the case for long.

Continuing to build out its unified SASE portfolio, Aryaka plans to integrate next-generation firewall, threat protection, Cloud Access Security Broker, and data protection capabilities into its zero-trust WAN architecture in 2023.