The client is a large, publicly traded energy company operating in all areas of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, power generation and trading. It has a global presence in almost 100 countries, employs close to 80,000 people and runs almost 500 corporate and field sites, including a next-generation field network with almost 40 offshore sites. The company has a market capitalization of over $50 billion and made over $200 billion in the past year.

With a growing mobile and disparate workforce, the energy firm needed to give its work-from-home (WFH) users the flexibility and performance to do their jobs. One challenge was delivering an assured experience for a high-bandwidth voice application hosted in the enterprise. WFH users also needed a private connection to the enterprise network to run day-to-day functions on custom network applications. Beyond its own staff, the company had to give contractors secure access to two different enterprise networks from a single client device, a requirement its incumbent solution, Zscaler, could not deliver.

The firm also held high standards for its security solution: multi-factor authentication on the client device via Google or Microsoft authentication, an "always-on" high-availability approach with quick failover options, and support for the provisioning phase before login.

Finally, the company already had a complex network infrastructure, with legacy data center hub routers and deployment plans for new hardware appliances handling both switching and Wi-Fi, as well as a WAN optimization solution. Any new solution had to work with existing and future infrastructure.

Versa Networks was able to quickly meet the energy company's use cases and requirements. For WFH users on the voice application, Versa demonstrated high performance, availability and secure access where Zscaler and another incumbent VPN competitor could not. Although the firm had already purchased over 50,000 Zscaler seats for cloud security at its branch sites, Zscaler could not support WFH access to the hosted voice application or protect contractor access to two enterprise networks from one device.

The firm had originally intended to bring in Palo Alto for its SASE implementation, but found that Versa integrated easily with its switching, Wi-Fi and WAN optimization vendors, delivering both SD-WAN and work-from-anywhere services. Versa's next-generation firewall (NGFW) proved superior to Palo Alto's, and the company consolidated costs by ripping and replacing Palo Alto NGFW at almost 400 branch sites with the Versa NGFW already included in the Versa SASE offering.

Versa was originally intended to provide only Secure SD-WAN services but went on to win additional use cases in the firm's SASE strategy. Versa now protects the company's next-generation field network, including almost 40 offshore sites, its core network, its multi-cloud network with Azure and AWS, and its 200+ work-from-home users. The firm has purchased almost 1,000 licenses covering Versa Secure SD-WAN, routing, NGFW and private access for its remote workforce. Throughout the proof of concept, Versa's support and service were always available, and the customer plans to extend the SASE footprint to every corner of its global network.

• Cost reduction through licensing and product consolidation, including replacing Palo Alto NGFW at almost 400 branch sites
• Control and visibility over branch sites with robust multitenancy and analytics
• Enhanced security with embedded next-generation firewall and encrypted private access
• Simplified networking architecture for easier IT administration
• Almost 400 sites protected today, with around 900 nodes expected at 100% deployment
• Secure work-from-anywhere access for 200+ WFH users and contractors, positioning the firm for further transformation projects