Wandera enters the hot Zero Trust Network Access market with its new offering, but it also sees Private Access as highly complementary to its existing Mobile Threat Defense offering.
Mobile security provider Wandera has moved into the Zero Trust Network Access [ZTNA] space with Wandera Private Access [WPA], a cloud-delivered service that provides secure remote access to applications, while also being four times faster than traditional VPNs.
“Customers today want a modern VPN, which means a software-defined perimeter,” said Michael Covington, Wandera’s VP of Product Strategy. “We are positioning this around connecting users to applications no matter where they are hosted – cloud, on-prem or SaaS. We provide the tunnels in a way that supports all protocols.”
While the market has been looking for a VPN replacement for decades, Gartner thinks that ZTNA is the silver bullet that will finally do the job. Their Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access projects that by 2023, 60% of enterprises will phase out most of their VPNs for ZTNA.
“We see ourselves as aligned with what Gartner calls a SASE [Secure Access Service Edge] market,” Covington said. “It’s very aspirational at this point, in bringing networking and security together. ZTNA is a key tool in this arsenal.” WPA adds these SASE capabilities to Wandera’s security offerings.
Wandera has transformed its approach to the market as the market has shifted, moving beyond the traditional focus on endpoints to also encompass applications, which is a key focus of WPA.
“We were really focused before on our Mobile Threat Defense product and our integration with Microsoft,” Covington stated. “We have always been focused on helping customers support remote workers, and we have taken the journey as a customer along with our own customers. They had pain in adding security and policy controls to these devices that didn’t have the tools they used anywhere else in the enterprise. Remote security is very niche and very focused, but customers don’t just care about endpoints. They care about applications.”
Covington said that when he joined Wandera almost six years ago, when the product then was focused on network security, even Mobile Threat Defense as a category didn’t exist. The shift to an application focus in security is part of that evolution.
“This new solution is focused on both endpoint and applications,” he stated. “We have transitioned from endpoint to application focus , but are building up a much larger stack of technologies around applications. In addition, our Private Access Solution isn’t just IoS and Android, It’s all solutions, including Windows and Mac. They can put this on any device they have in their fleet.”
Covington emphasized that the market is looking to move away from 25 year-old remote access technology. WPA provides much higher performance than traditional VPN. Speed is measured at 0.403 ms, which is 4x faster than traditional VPS. WPA throughput, at 1,011 mbps, is 3.5x faster.
Covington said that while WPA is an enterprise-grade solution, and is positioned as such, they expect it to do very well downmarket.
“We drive messaging of better and more sophisticated security which is targeted at the enterprise buyer, but I see this as having incredible opportunity downmarket,” he indicated. “A key component is usability. Because this is a service, a customer can deploy it with no hardware requirements at all. The reduction in hardware in my discussions with customers over the last six months has made this very palatable to SMB and midmarket customers. It was so expensive for them to get that hardware and they didn’t have the teams to manage it. As a result, data remote access has been reserved for the elite – not for every employee in the company, Because they had to buy hardware, they didn’t size the hardware for every employee, because it was too costly. COVID taught them that they had to think differently, and that they had to support all the employees.”
Covington also noted that while WPA is being positioned as a standalone SKU – to accommodate to where they think the buying centres will be – they also see it as highly complementary to their Mobile Threat Defense offering.
“We have also made it so that if you add Private Access to our existing Threat Defense product , you get a more robust, ‘better together’ story,” he said. “When a company defines remote user policies, with Mobile Threat Defense we can also add risk assessment and break a compromised connection immediately. For all of our current channel sellers focused on Threat Defense, this gives them a heck of an add-on to that story. It will really help the channel to have this capability for differentiation and upsell.”
But there is a lot more in play here from a channel perspective, Covington added.
“ZTNA is a new market area and being coupled with other big picture stories around SASE and Unified Endpoint Security, will provide new ways for the channel to be successful,” he said. This may ultimately lead to involving new channels as well.
WPA is available now.
