Aryaka, one of the early software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) vendors, has acquired Secucloud, a German security company that will bring secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Secucloud, which has about 30 employees, will continue to operate out of its offices in Hamburg as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aryaka.
Aryaka has always been a bit unique among SD-WAN vendors because it has its own global network of points of presence. “We’ve had a very differentiated architecture from day one,” said Shashi Kiran, chief marketing officer at Aryaka. Not only does the company offer its SD-WAN technology, but it’s developed relationships with ISPs around the world.
“We saw this trend toward convergence starting to happen,” said Kiran. “We have, in the last little while, taken the goodness we had with our global network, extended it to the last mile, expanded our edge footprint and hosted best-of-breed firewalls.”
In terms of the last mile, Kiran said, “We realized that there was a lot of complexity enterprises were experiencing dealing with different ISPS. It was a bit of a challenge. The problem was compounded if they had global locations.” So Aryaka started working with different ISPs to connect the last mile circuit in order to provide a complete end-to-end service for customers. “Our job is to shield them from the complexities of technology,” he said.
Covid propels SD-WAN, SASE
Kiran said, “The pandemic created a huge forcing function” for SD-WAN because “a number of enterprises wanted to get away from MPLS at a much faster clip because it wasn’t lending itself to managing change quickly.”
Aryaka was prepared to serve this boost in enterprise demand for SD-WAN. And it had been working with third-party security vendors — including Palo Alto Networks and Check Point — for a few years to integrate security features in its service.
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The company also responded to the migration of workers from offices to homes by introducing its Private Access solution. Kiran said, “We saw this was the direction a lot of customers were actively thinking about, but a three-to-five-year transition got accelerated because of the pandemic.”
The SD-WAN ecosystem has been transformed with the rise of the SASE phenomenon, which blends together SD-WAN and security. According to Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa, SASE came about because SD-WAN “broke security” in the WAN, and that caused the “rethinking of security.”
Aryaka's purchase of Secucloud takes it to the next level, allowing it to integrate SASE security for enterprises into its PoPs. Secucloud’s technology includes a cloud-based firewall-as-a-service and a secure web gateway with threat protection capabilities. The platform is engineered to connect all edges including WAN, cloud, mobile and IoT.
Aryaka expects new SASE products as a result of the Secucloud acquisition to be available later in 2021.
The SD-WAN vendor currently operates in about 125 countries, and it has “hundreds” of enterprise customers according to Kiran. Its biggest competitors are telco providers, which offer SD-WAN often with the aid of a third-party SD-WAN vendor.
With the addition of the Secucloud team Aryaka has offices in four places: California, India, the U.K. and now Germany.