Monday Morning Impact – May 1

Aryaka: Investments in SASE and Network-as-a-Service on the Rise

Aryaka has released its annual Enterprise Network Transformation report suggesting that CIOs, CISOs and IT leaders are doubling down on cloud investments despite the uncertain economy.

The rapid shift to cloud services and the complexity of a hybrid workforce appears to have changed how modern IT leaders view network and security, according to the San Mateo, California-based SD-WAN and SASE company.

Significantly, 98% of those surveyed indicated they plan to increase their investment in cloud services, despite ongoing economic uncertainty. This counters the narrative of a “technology slowdown,” instead indicating that IT leaders are shifting from traditional IT to the cloud, which is aligned with the workforce’s adoption of hybrid and remote models. Furthermore, 94% of respondents believe SASE will play a larger role in their networking and security plans, while 62% plan to eliminate MPLS from their operations.

“In this current era of uncertainty, chaos and unprecedented times, one of the consistencies we are seeing is that businesses need to be flexible, adaptable and ready for anything,” said Matt Carter, Aryaka CEO. “Our report indicates that the vast majority of CIOs, CISOs and IT leaders are preparing for this uncertainty by investing in and adopting architecture, policies and technologies that converge networking and security, as these disciplines are critical to business success.”

Nearly half (47%) of survey respondents indicated that they plan to accelerate cloud and network services adoption despite current economic conditions.

The report was compiled from a survey of more than 230 C-level, vice president and director-level leaders at global enterprises in network and security roles, uncovering priorities, challenges, and opportunities for the coming year.

Channel Impact^®
The report drives home the importance of automation and integration while cybersecurity continues to be a pressing issue.

VMware Extends Cloud Managed Service Offerings

VMware has rolled out “Cross-Cloud Managed Services,” a set of prescriptive offers designed to enable partners to expand their managed services practices. The announcement also includes improved incentives and go-to-market activities.

“With our global ecosystem of VMware Cross-Cloud Managed Services Providers, we will help customers to evolve from cloud chaos to cloud smart while achieving outcomes faster,” said Zia Yusuf, senior vice president, strategic ecosystem, and industry solutions at VMware.

The Hybrid Cloud version of the offering promises to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for on-premises environments, simplify operations, reduce risk with observability, actionable insight, and performance optimization, and accelerate cloud migrations. These offers will include managed services for private or sovereign cloud, and managed services for public cloud. Partners will build these services using VMware Cloud on AWS or new VMware Cloud Packs, which will include hyperconverged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure with advanced automation, compute with advanced automation, and VMware Cloud Foundation.

The Native Public Cloud and Modern Apps versions are intended to enable customers to automate more secure modern platform operations across multiple clouds, achieve centralized governance and deliver better cost controls. These offers will include “Centralized Governance,” powered by VMware Aria, “Cost Optimization,” powered by VMware Aria Cost, and “Cloud Native App Delivery,” powered by VMware Tanzu.

According to the Palo Alto-based company, badged partners can potentially earn up to 40 percent more rewards for providing assessments and proofs-of-concept, up to 100 percent more than non-badged partners for deployment services, and significantly more back-end rebates for selling VMware Cross-Cloud managed services through the new Sell incentive in Partner Connect.

A new “Bring Your Own Subscription” option will allow customers to deploy existing VMware subscriptions to VMware Cross-Cloud Managed Services Provider environments.

Channel Impact^®
The new initiative is expected to simplify and accelerate partner-led managed service engagements.

Illumio Announces Incident Response Partner Program

Illumio, a Sunnyvale, California-based Zero Trust Segmentation company, has rolled out its new Incident Response Partner Program designed to help organizations respond, contain, and recover faster during ransomware and other breaches. The program leverages the Illumio ZTS Platform, promising immediate network visibility, faster resolution, and prevention of reinfection.

Providers typically use Illumio ZTS alongside endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, increasing EDR’s allotted time to detect threats. In addition to network visibility, the solution features segmentation, thereby removing the need to create VLANs or use firewalls.

A 24/7 on-demand technical support team is also available.

“The biggest challenge in incident response is that those leading the investigation or recovery often are not familiar with the environment,” says Ryan Ikeler, Head of Incident Response and Managed Services at Illumio. “Adding Zero Trust Segmentation into the recovery process not only provides a level of visibility that many didn’t even know was possible, but it minimizes risk and allows organizations to recover faster, reducing the spread, cost, and operational impact of attacks.”

In addition to Illumio’s Incident Response Partner Program, Illumio has added new dashboards and an improved user interface to make it easier for customers to manage their Illumio deployments. The dashboards enable organizations to identify which ports and workloads are at critical, high, medium, and low risk and visualizing the number of protected and unprotected workloads.

“Breaches happen, so organizations must always assume breach and behave as though a bad actor is already inside their organization,” said Mario Espinoza, Chief Product Officer at Illumio. “These new dashboards help security teams drive measurable risk reduction.”

Channel Impact^®
The combined value proposition is designed to help channel partners be more responsive to their customers’ security needs and potential threat vectors in real time.