Aryaka brings CASB into unified SASE fold

Aryaka continues to build out its SASE platform, adding new capabilities aimed at enhancing security and simplifying the adoption process for enterprises that want to consolidate their network and security deployments.

At the heart of this update is Aryaka’s new cloud access security broker (CASB). A CASB is used to help secure access to cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The new CASB capability is directly integrated into the Aryaka platform in a bid to enable organizations to have more control and visibility over network traffic in and out of cloud applications.

The platform update also includes the Aryaka Interactive Product Experience (IPX), which is a service to help organizations with SASE proof-of-concept deployments. Aryaka is also partnering with Menlo Security to enable remote browser isolation (RBI) capabilities over a SASE deployment.

The new features build on Aryaka’s existing platform, which has a strong network foundation.

“Aryaka is one of the very few companies that owns the underlay network layer ourselves,” Renuka Nadkarni, chief product officer at Aryaka, told Network World. “So we actually have our own POPs (points of presence), which are globally distributed, and the customer traffic is sent over Aryaka’s network, and it’s not commingling with the basic internet traffic.”

Why CASB is essential to modern SASE

While CASB as a technology is not a new thing, it is a new feature for the Aryaka SASE platform.

Nadkarni said that without built-in CASB, Aryaka customers were using the company’s cloud connector to connect to third-party security solutions for cloud access control. 

“Now it’s integrated at the network layer,” she explained. “It’s easier to manage in one place, where all the policies are easier to troubleshoot. Because, now when we do our configuration in Aryaka, you can actually see at what point the traffic was either denied or dropped or where the policies are for each one.”

The CASB capabilities allow Aryaka to provide granular access control and visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud application usage. “Because we are the transit network for the customer, anything and everything that the users use, we have full visibility into it,” Nadkarni said.

Testing SASE on non-production traffic

A key challenge for any organization considering SASE is how to test it – no network administrator wants to try out a proof of concept on a production network. Aryaka’s IPX is aimed at that issue.

IPX is a virtual environment where organizations can try out Aryaka capabilities by running traffic between different points across the globe and experiment with different configurations, Nadkarni said. This interactive environment allows potential customers to experience Aryaka’s unified SASE platform without impacting their production traffic.

SASE for AI? Aryaka delivers

Recognizing the growing importance of AI workloads in enterprise environments, Aryaka has introduced AI Perform, a solution designed to optimize network performance for AI applications.

“We think of AI workloads as just another traffic type,” Nadkarni said. “AI workloads are nothing but a different kind of traffic type, there are new kinds of protocols, there are new kinds of access that also need better networking, better security, and, of course, observability.”

AI Perform addresses two critical challenges:

1. Massive data transfers required for AI model training
2. Need for reliable, low-latency connectivity across diverse resources

The platform applies techniques including WAN optimization, deduplication, and compression specifically tailored for AI traffic.

Looking ahead, Aryaka plans to introduce AI Secure, focusing on three main areas of AI security: access control, threat protection and data loss/knowledge leakage prevention. “We are actually doubling down on AI traffic processing,” Nadkarni said.