Versa Networks won another software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) deal in Asia, this one with Japan’s KDDI.

KDDI will begin rolling out Versa’s SD-WAN in Japan in December. It will then expand the offering to 37 countries, beginning in March 2018, to serve its business customers around the world. This is KDDI’s first SD-WAN product offering.

Akihito Fujii, general manager of KDDI's cloud services planning unit, said the company needs to educate its channel partners and internal engineers. “We have hundreds of field engineers for those deployments inside KDDI,” said Fujii. “We also have an external partner for that service deployment. We need to educate and train those people.”

KDDI will approach its enterprise customers gently with a “small start” SD-WAN, which includes a customer premise device and software for some basic virtualization of their application traffic. Of course, enterprises can also select a full-blown SD-WAN package with a variety of functions.

“This kind of flexibility is an advantage of SD-WAN; there’s no need to take a big risk,” said Fujii.

Masahiro Kajikawa, general manager in KDDI’s network services planning unit, said, “It depends on the customer request, some big enterprises would ask KDDI to deploy widely. We interviewed tons of customers and investigated the customer environment. I think most customers will chose the small-start and go step-by-step.”

Kumar Mehta, founder and chief development officer of Versa Networks, said, “KDDI has a presence in 190 countries and 48 data center locations that allows them to unfold the service globally to the Japanese multinationals around the world. They wanted to realize software networking, not go with proprietary hardware for SD-WAN."

For the SD-WAN security, KDDI will provide two security features. First, it will include Versa’s software-defined security. And secondly, it will provide cloud security from Symantec. “Some customers use Office 365, and they need web security,” said Fujii. “That’s an additional value-add from Symantec.”

Just today, Symantec announced a new cloud security product that allows customers to monitor and contain threats across all devices, networks, and applications within a single Symantec agent. The product — called Endpoint Security for the Cloud Generation — brings together several security features.

One feature, for example, turns the tables on attackers by bringing deception capabilities to endpoint protection. The technology deceives attackers into believing they have successfully breached an organization, when in reality, attackers are shunted to a false environment and served up fake assets and information while the security team works to neutralize the attack.