Masergy has launched Masergy SD-WAN 3.0, revamping its SD-WAN service under the SASE framework and providing 100% availability SLAs for its network and cloud platform.

Masergy's SD-WAN 3.0 is the "third step in our journey toward fully autonomous networking. We recently added AIOps, Shadow IT and customer provisioning and this is another monumental step to that," explains Ray Watson, vice president of Global Technology for Masergy. "It really involves a massive expansion of offerings we can give to customers for SD-WAN, which will give us the ability to sell to businesses of a wider variety of sizes and we'll bring true co-management."

Figure 1: Ray Watson, vice president of Global Technology for Masergy.

The managed SD-WAN service is getting a facelift to fall in line with Gartner's Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) terminology, which combines network security functions with WAN capabilities to meet enterprises' secure access needs, explains Gartner's Andrew Lerner in a recent blog.

Service providers and vendors in the SD-WAN space – such as Cato Networks and VMware – are increasingly adopting the SASE terminology to better summarize their efforts in bringing together WAN and security services.

John Burke, CIO and Principal Research Analyst for Nemertes Research, says the SASE trend addresses "the future of where wide area networking is going, into something that consolidates secure access, SD-WAN, cloud interconnectivity and policy enforcement all under one policy umbrella." Nemertes has its own acronym to explain the security-meets-WAN trend – secure cloud access and policy enforcement (SCAPE).

As part of its SASE overhaul, Masergy claims to now deliver 100% availability SLAs for its network and cloud platform which includes 100% site-level uptime guarantees, cloud service availability and in-sequence packet delivery for customers on Masergy's network. Masergy will also provide proactive credits to customers if they don't meet the 100% availability guarantees, and promises less than 1ms of jitter and five-minute proactive outage notifications.

"That they're offering 100% availability SLA is pretty significant," says Burke. "Other aspects of what they're announcing are also pretty important, especially the expansion of cloud interconnections. It's very impressive not just that they'll offer [100% availability SLA] but that they're going to just credit your account when they detect downtime in the management console."

In addition to connecting to additional cloud service and SaaS providers, Masergy has made a number of updates to existing features in its SD-WAN service such as improving co-managed services, and providing private peering for SaaS applications delivered on SaaS Optimization VPNs. Masergy's SD-WAN connects to the major SaaS and IaaS providers including Microsoft Azure and 365, Oracle Cloud, Box, Salesforce, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and AWS. There are an additional 190 cloud providers that the SD-WAN service can connect to, says Masergy's Watson.

Also, Masergy continues to provide more security services on its SD-WAN platform, including Unified Threat Management, threat monitoring and response, managed security services, its Cloud Access Security Broker and cloud-based firewall service.

Figure 2: Masergy's SD-WAN gets SASE

In April, Masergy added the Identity-Based WAN Analytics feature to its SD-WAN service. The feature provides per-user analytics for IT teams to more quickly identify user activity and remediate risks from shadow IT, which occurs when employees utilize cloud-based SaaS without approval from corporate IT. In mid-January, Masergy also began providing Shadow IT Discovery, a security tool for improving visibility into unauthorized SaaS applications, for its managed SD-WAN customers. The goal of the Shadow IT Discovery service is to improve embedded security in Masergy's SD-WAN service and provide visibility into potential causes of data breaches.

Looking at the broader SD-WAN market, Nemertes' Burke predicts there will be more consolidation in the market this year. This will take the form of SD-WAN companies purchasing intellectual property and customer lists from each other, a "continued evolution of the managed service offering," and much of the technological innovation will focus on integration with security services and work-from-home deployment models.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading