Versa Networks last month announced the general commercial availability of Versa Sovereign SASE (secure access service edge), a solution designed to bring enterprises and service providers greater control, autonomy and privacy over their SASE environment.

The solution comes at a time when demand for control is skyrocketing amid heightening security threats and tightening compliance and regulatory requirements.

“SASE has become the de facto framework/architecture for connecting any user, any device, any location and any workload,” said Kelly Ahuja, president and CEO, while introducing the solution at Networking Field Day last week.

Now companies are leaning more towards building and managing their SASE environments internally on owned infrastructure to ensure greater data privacy while avoiding risks of outages and disruptions resulting from dependency on third-party SaaS infrastructure.

Very large companies with their own pool of talents do not rely for support on external vendors and prefer using a sovereign version of SASE that can be operated by in-house teams.

Versa Networks seeks to “secure anytime access to anything” but with the significant addition of tailoring solutions to meet customers’ individual business case.

Sovereign SASE is “tailored to meet the customers’ needs,” Ahuja said.

Built with the needs of highly regulated industries and organizations seeking high levels of protection for their infrastructure top of mind, the solution directly serves use cases of defense organizations, financial firms and retail companies.

“The drivers for each vertical is slightly different,” said Anuj Dutia, VP of Global Solutions Strategy.

A very large global service provider for example may refuse to be a cloud reseller, instead wanting the provider to leverage its own network and datacenters it has poured hundreds of millions of dollars building, to ensure privacy, Dutia pointed out.

A retailer or a low-margin industry may however expect different outcomes entirely, such as higher operational efficiency, lower TCO and better user experience.

“That means I want the gateway to be near me instead of being somewhere on the other side of the country,” he said.

For those customers, Versa delivers SASE via dedicated gateways in customers’ private infrastructure, allowing them to manage and control the gateways on a DIY model.

Versa also operates over 90 points of presence (PoPs) globally that makes the backbone for its SASE as-a-service solution that is delivered via shared gateways.

“The big bucket of people wants complete control,” Dutia told. “That’s because of compliance, and sometimes out of sheer [in-house] capabilities.”

Packed as one of the three deployment options under the single software stack, VersaONE Universal SASE, Sovereign SASE offers a do-it-yourself model that allows full control and freedom.

Versa Networks likens the Sovereign SASE experience to getting a property built by a contractor on owned land.  “You give me the lot, I’ll build [a] hotel for you. When build is complete, I’ll give you the keys. At that point, you decide if you want me to manage it or would you do it yourself.”

Sovereign SASE provides an air-gapped infrastructure that is purpose-built to meet all security, operational, compliance and data residency requirements of the respective users.

“A typical defense company would want to make sure that [it is] not sharing a single piece of hardware, network, sometimes even the data centers in co-lo or the cloud with anyone else,” Dutia noted.

As a result, separation needs to be maintained across the data, control and management planes.

“When it comes to Sovereign SASE, not a single component is shared. So when I say “air-gap”, it is completely separated from every other enterprise service provider or any other customer that is out there,” Dutia told.

Versa says that Sovereign SASE can be deployed on moving environments at the edge where security is historically weak, for example, on automobiles, airplanes, trains and even ships, which would extend zero trust security to those endpoints.

After being in testing with several defense, maritime and financial companies for the past two years, Sovereign SASE is now available for purchase at Versa.

The current global SASE market is valued at $3.82 billion and is expected to overshoot $12 billion end of this year.

Versa, named a challenger in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in Single Vendor SASE, projects Sovereign SASE to boost the market value by at least 25 to 30% with improved economics, flexibility of deployment and extended enforcement of zero trust.