VMware Bringing SASE to SD-WAN VMworld 2020

At VMworld 2020 a new solution called Edge Network Intelligence from the Nyansa acquisition has been announced. One thing you have to appreciate about VMware is they will acquire a company to add a missing feature to their portfolio. The VeloCloud acquisition bringing SD-WAN to VMware was a huge piece to add to the edge portfolio. The piece that was missing was being able to layer on top a secure access service edge (SASE) solution to allow companies the ability to apply secure access no matter where their users, applications, or devices are located. In this article I will be covering an overview of the new Edge Network Intelligence solution by VMware.

Exapnds portfolio deeper into the enterprise edge

Surface of edge is growing – breathe and complexity

Orgs trying to become Wireless first – primary mode of connectivity and support for WiFi 6

Brings to enterprise teams is delivering productivity to end user experience and providing security operations the visibility they need for IoT devices that are increasingly being brought into the enterprise.

At a high level edge network intelligence is a vendor neutral solution that consumes many data sources to solve for certain use cases. Integrates with all WLAN/LAN providers, collects data from adjacent devices like a router and switches. For some critical business apps there is API integration.

Learn baseline of devices and detect anomalies that impact customer experience and getting to root cause

Proactive side of house – auto recommendations on what incremental improvements users will benefit from if changes made

Allows for the path to self-healing – policy changes that will benefit end user experiences dynamically

Above are just some of the critical use cases for SASE and Edge Network Intelligence. This has never been more important as the new norm of work from home for many employees throughout the country as a result of COVID-19.

Application assurance’s goal is to identify applications that end users are leveraging from outside the datacenter the moment they connect to the network. Thus, allowing IT teams to be more proactive instead of reactive.

It is one thing to identify the applications on the network. It is another situation to take a before/after baseline and when changes (deliberate or environmental) are made and the analyzing the impacts to the application and network.

Another value add is the ability to isolate faults and discover is the problem inside the network or on the application side.

The ability to search for a particular user reporting issues, or an application we know is suffering performance issues and seeing all the users impacted, or searching for a user’s specific device that is having issues is another value add of application assurance.

The license comes in two flavors; you can either have it as an add on when purchasing VMware SD-WAN or you can buy the stand alone license.

Summary:
As you can see through the acquisition of Nyansa bringing SASE capabilities into the VMware network portfolio has been a great addition. As more workloads move to the edge and more branch sites emerge in environments, the Edge Network intelligence is in a perfect position to best serve VMware customers. As always, I hope y’all found this useful.

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