VMware SASE Picture ‘Completed’ With Cloud Web Security Offering

‘Most MSPs didn’t go to VMware for security in the first place, so I think VMware has a lot of market share to gobble up with its current partner base because they’ve entered the landscape,’ one VMware VeloCloud partner tells CRN.

VMware is no longer leaving security revenue on the table.

The company on Tuesday announced the general availability of VMware Cloud Web Security, a cloud-hosted service that extends VMware’s VeloCloud’s SD-WAN and VMware Secure Access to users working from anywhere to their applications in the cloud, using the same points of presence that VMware uses to deliver it’s SD-WAN, Sanjay Uppal (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s service provider and edge business unit, told CRN.

VMware has an existing relationship with cloud security provider Zscaler, but the addition of Cloud Web Security “completes the picture” for VMware’s own SASE strategy, Uppal said.

“When customers ask for best of breed, that’s the solution. But with VMware Cloud Web Security, we obviously don’t have to have a handoff. It’s a single pass architecture that many people, we believe, will find attractive,” he said.

[Related: VMware Acquiring Nyansa To Boost SD-WAN Through AI]

Uppal, VeloCloud’s CEO and co-founder before the company was acquired by VMware in 2017, said that Cloud Web Security is another extensible service that gives the channel not only something new to sell, but a very relevant application layer offering. “The channel partner has dialogue that they can get into with the end customer that’s at a much more strategic level than just providing boxes and infrastructure,” he said. “It’s a continuous relationship.”

“Most MSPs didn’t go to VMware for security in the first place, so I think VMware has a lot of market share to gobble up with its current partner base because they’ve entered the landscape,” said Frank Cittadino, CEO for QoS Networks, an Irvine, Calif.-based networking and cloud solution provider.

Cittadino called Cloud Web Security a “big deal” for VMware. The company has been good at SD-WAN and allowing access to the cloud for a long time, but adding in security has been a ”fundamental opportunity” for the company, he said.

“As we look at the SASE market growing, we were looking at VMware for an answer,” he said. “Integrated security is going to be really important.”

SD-WAN devices were the most commonly booked products For QoS Networks over the last year. The addition of cloud security to the SD-WAN device is making the company’s job “significantly easier,” Cittadino said.

“It makes the sales a lot easier because the conversation goes from: “We’ll add Zscaler” to security being inherently baked into the product. You don’t need to go out and buy anything else, integrate anything else, or have two sets of vendor management to worry about,” he said.

VMware partner Coevolve, an SD-WAN and cloud networking-focused solution provider, has been carefully watching the enterprise networking space go from steady and stable, to shaken up by startups bursting onto the scene with SD-WAN technology. The firm partnered with then-VeloCloud and has since rolled out a VeloCloud-powered SD-WAN solution to customers in 78 countries, said Ciaran Roche, co-founder and CTO of Coevolve.

Coevolve is helping its clients source a mix of connectivity options, depending on their location, with an SD-WAN layer on top, Roche said. VMware’s direction is to provide as many additional layers to capabilities over basic IT infrastructure, and now that one of those layers includes security, it will be a familiar -- and badly needed -- offering for enterprises, he said.

“For us, the transition looks quite natural, because the architecture that VMware is adopting for the for the SASE model is very much building on the gateway concept that they have used for a long time as part of the SD-WAN solution,” he said. “Having it all in one -- one interface, one set of policies, one set of rules -- I think, is an appealing model for the clients that we’re working with.”