Why we acquired Secucloud, and what does it mean for our customers?

On May 4th, 2021, we announced the acquisition of Secucloud, GmbH, an innovative security technology company, based in Germany. This is Aryaka’s first acquisition in the history of our company, and I would like to provide some additional context on the reasons behind it, what we see on the road ahead and how we believe our customers will benefit from it.

First, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the entire Secucloud team – Willkommen Secucloud!

Why did we acquire Secucloud?

Over the past 18 months, Aryaka has been investing in developing security solutions for the enterprise. Developed initially as a result of technology integration with partners like Check Point software as well as other security leaders like Palo Alto networks, these solutions have allowed us to gain considerable traction in the industry. Most of these deployments are on-premises, where the firewalls are hosted on Aryaka’s service edge nodes, the ANAPs, and managed by the Aryaka operations team, providing customers with a best of breed SD-WAN as-a-service solution, along with choice of firewall vendors all integrated into a compact form factor.

Over the past year, we have secured large deals combining our cloud-first approach to managed SD-WAN as-a-service, with the hosting and management of firewall-as-a-service across verticals, including security sensitive and regulated industries like financial services. These deployments have straddled on-premises and cloud-based models.

In December 2020, we also launched the Aryaka private access solutions, addressing a need to accommodate hybrid workplaces, with solutions for the “anywhere” workers. This was a client-based solution, integrated into Aryaka points of presence, allowing for global rollout of these capabilities quickly and enable enterprises to make their remote employees and partners productive. We supplemented these capabilities with bandwidth pooling, bursting etc. that accorded more flexibility.

While both the above are and will continue to be extremely relevant and valid use-cases, a class of customers are looking for a greater convergence of network and network security to be delivered as-a-service, with a cloud-based architecture. These solutions should encompass a greater degree of flexibility in bringing together the cloud and edge, site and user, network and security, while making it easier to consume services, manage change and radically simplify the architecture. Gartner calls this a SASE – Secure Access Service Edge.

For us, acquiring Secucloud was a means to able to deliver on the promise of a managed SASE offering, while providing customers and partners greater choice for the type of solution they would position for different deployment use-cases.

When our CTO Ashwath Nagaraj and I evaluated a few different companies, it was important for us to get a company that had a solid technology stack, a great team and cultural alignment with Aryaka. Secucloud checked all these three areas.

How will Secucloud fit into the Aryaka portfolio?

Aryaka has a global network with a set of service hubs or service points of presence (POPs). These are high performance, and control points for us to activate services, as well as manage and monitor the services lifecycle.

Bringing the security capabilities as a result of the Secucloud capabilities into these POPs and tying them with our automation, orchestration and monitoring workflows, as well as the MyAryaka cloud portal, would allow us to deliver a significantly better end-to-end experience.

The Aryaka architecture is built ground-up for a cloud-first as-a-service approach, for services, with congruency between edge-cloud, including multi-cloud, as well as users and sites. Bringing the Secucloud technology in here would be a natural extension of our architecture.

What would the initial offering look like?

While the organizations are just getting together to discuss the integration, this is what we’re looking to bring about starting sometime in the 2H of 2021 and evolving the capabilities moving forward.

This is a preliminary view, and we’ll provide more details as the two teams come together.

What happens to the existing solutions with security Technology partners?

The Secucloud acquisition is mostly complementary to some of the solutions we have with other partners. We will continue to position, sell and support those based on the needs of customers. We expect these use-cases to be valid for a long time.

Our relationship with the likes of Check Point software is as a managed provider. That will continue as we bring the right solutions in front of customers that require a trusted firewall vendor, or when there is a need for on-premises deployment. Similar would be the case for a customer preference towards Palo Alto Networks firewall, or others that we may integrate on the service edge ANAPs. We will also continue to support our technology integrations with cloud security partners such as Zscaler to provide customers with flexibility and choice.

The Aryaka Private Access solution is the Aryaka VPN-as-a-Service with the VPN client, with zero trust capabilities along with our internal technology as well as technology partner solutions like Check Point Harmony connect for secure internet gateway capabilities. These too would continue with support for zero trust capabilities in line with the ZTNA requirements of the SASE architecture, and evolve into supporting capabilities derived from Secucloud.

The new products we expect to bring about as a result of the Secucloud acquisition sometime during the 2H of 2021 would be where the solution is more seamlessly integrated into our POP-architecture and overall workflow. We expect to initially launch offerings for the mid-market enterprise segment and evolve capabilities over time.

We believe the evolution towards SASE to still be multi-year for the industry at large, including for the larger companies.

Our goal will not be to fall into a buzzword trap, but rather focus on offering that will deliver compelling value to our customers and partners. While we recognize that capabilities like CASB are important, they will, where required come through technology partnerships. Eventually, SASE or any other technology buzzword is a means to an end. We’ll be led by customers in navigating this landscape

How will customers benefit?

We recognize that our customers and prospects are at different stages of their journey. They need flexibility. The approach we are taking, gives them CHOICE!

There are not many in the industry that can support multiple security vendors or a combination of on-premises and cloud-based deployment models. Aryaka does both.

There aren’t many vendors that have their own technology and also deliver it as a managed service. Again, Aryaka does both!

Enterprises that work with Aryaka will see us handholding them for on-premises deployments, global networks, application performance issues with some of the world’s best SLAs, network security, remote access, multi-cloud deployments as well as last-mile services.

In other words, we are taking away the complexity for customers that have to invest time and resources to do this in-house, or having to work with traditional Telcos, who don’t own the technology resulting in poor integration and experience issues.

What about channel partners?

Aryaka channel partners would have an opportunity to further expand the addressable market and solve for additional use-cases with confidence.

We expect to reach out and spend more time with our partners and getting their inputs over the next few months.

So, what’s next?

Now the fun begins, where the teams come together and innovate. We are very excited to have the Secucloud team on board, and to have new offices in Germany. Stay tuned as we evolve this space further.

(Originally published on May 4th, 2021 on the Aryaka website)