Suite of AI technologies supporting all products is integrated into the Versa Unified SASE platform

Santa Clara, Calif. – Aug. 21, 2023 – Versa Networks, a global leader in AI/ML powered Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), today announced a set of enhancements to VersaAI that includes new embedded generative AI capabilities to identify malicious behaviors in real time, secure generative AI tools, and enhance network and security operational excellence. These capabilities are powered by a shared set of fine-tuned AI/ML engines natively integrated into the Versa Unified SASE platform and used across its product portfolio.

The Need for AI in Security and Networking

In today’s business environment, networks and security are indispensable and intrinsically linked, but the infrastructure to deliver these services has grown in complexity and risk due to the rise of public cloud, SaaS applications, and the need to integrate point products. Security and networking teams are faced with a constant barrage of threats and outages.

These events are tremendously expensive – the cost per breach is over $4M, the cost per network outage is up to $300K per hour, and the cost to the brand is immeasurable. CISOs, CIOs and their understaffed teams struggle with these challenges while they are overwhelmed by massive volumes of telemetry data from point products, limited budgets, and legacy processes that can’t scale – necessitating AI’s intervention to level the playing field.

Against this backdrop, VersaAI has been delivering a set of advanced capabilities to simplify management and monitoring of complex networks while securing the infrastructure. With VersaAI, customers access a comprehensive set of threat protection, data protection, and operational capabilities across the Versa product portfolio. The integration of these advanced AI technologies into the Versa Unified SASE platform has revolutionized security and networking and delivers unparalleled protection and operational innovation for Versa’s customers.

Telemetry Data Is Key to AI Success

The Versa Unified SASE Platform integrates a panoramic data set from across the entire infrastructure – from the WAN Edge, Cloud, Campus, remote locations, users and devices – into a unified data lake. VersaAI taps into this data lake to extract AI/ML insights that are seamlessly applied across the Versa product suite.

“Our advantage lies in our unparalleled ability to train and correlate data across extensive unified security and networking telemetry,” said Kumar Mehta, Founder and Chief Development Officer of Versa Networks. “With our vast SASE deployment base, the telemetry data is leveraged to fine tune Large Language Models (LLMs) to bolster security posture in real time with a high degree of accuracy and automation and optimize network operations and performance.”

What’s New in VersaAI

VersaAI introduces several exciting new capabilities supporting advanced security and networking use cases:

VersaAI for Security

Built on the current UEBA and AIOps modules that identify threats and anomalous behaviors while delivering actionable insights for accelerated remediation, the new capabilities include:

• AI/ML-Enhanced Malware Detection for Advanced Threat Protection: This new capability deploys multi-stage AI/ML for real-time pre-processing of files and code snippets to identify malware. With early adopters, this technique has already proven effective in eliminating zero-day attacks covering 90% of common file types while reducing the load on sandboxes by 75%.

• AI-powered Adaptive Microsegmentation: Organizations can now enforce tailored Zero Trust conditional access controls for users, IT/OT devices and resources. They can continuously assess user behavior using AI/ML-based UEBA and device posture while isolating potential threats into microsegments in real-time. Potential threats are identified closest to the host, limiting the blast radius for a possible attack within the enterprise perimeter.

• Generative AI Security: This capability delivers granular, policy-based controls for Generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) to help enterprises protect against unauthorized access and action.

• AI-Assisted DLP (Limited Access): This capability enhances pattern-recognition DLP with context-based analysis by fine-tuned LLMs to identify sensitive data. This protects enterprises from data leakage of company proprietary information, including source code and personal identifiable information within prompt windows, documents, and images.

VersaAI for Networking

Built on Verbo, an NLP-based chatbot, and VANI, a specialized machine learning core for detecting and predicting anomalies, VersaAI for Networking delivers AI-assisted features that have automated troubleshooting, optimized operations, reduced network downtime and improved predictability. New capabilities include:

• VersaGPT: Eases daily operations with generative AI-powered access to Versa documentation and knowledge base. This improves enterprise productivity through a guided experience and access to how-to guides, configuration information, recommendations, and the sources from which the information is derived.

• AI-Informed Predictive Traffic Steering: With this enhancement to VANI’s fine-tuned predictive networking engine, security and networking teams can pre-emptively adjust traffic paths in real time to avoid degradation or reachability issues, and to seamlessly maintain application and network SLAs. This lessens the need for expensive digital experience tools that are necessary with other competitive solutions.

“We’re extremely excited about the potential these new capabilities unlock,” Mehta shared. “At Versa, we are committed to continuous innovation to help our customers by harnessing the potential of AI to deliver business outcomes.”

More information about VersaAI can be found at https://versa-networks.com/products/versaai.