Versa Delivers Security and Networking Innovations for the AI-Ready Enterprise

Versa, the global leader in unified security and networking, announced a new release of the VersaONE Universal SASE Platform with AI-driven capabilities spanning infrastructure, data protection, and operations. Designed to support secure AI adoption, these innovations provide organizations with a strong foundation for scaling AI across distributed environments without added complexity or risk.

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As enterprises operationalize AI across teams and locations, CIOs and CISOs face a familiar tension: accelerate AI adoption without expanding data risk or operational friction. Versa’s latest enhancements help IT and security teams deploy AI workloads at the network edge, protect sensitive data more effectively, and gain clear insight into what’s happening across their environments.

“AI is moving from pilots to production, and enterprises need a unified foundation to scale it safely,” said Kumar Mehta, founder and chief development officer, Versa. “With this VersaONE release, Versa brings AI-ready edge infrastructure, stronger data protection, and AI-powered operations together in one SASE platform, so teams can accelerate adoption while keeping risk, complexity, and control firmly in check.”

AI-Enhanced Data Protection

Versa’s AI-powered data protection capabilities address a growing set of modern data risks driven by AI adoption, cloud applications, and increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques. As sensitive data moves through images, documents, SaaS platforms, and AI-enabled workflows, traditional inspection and rule-based DLP controls often lack the visibility and context needed to keep pace.

This release expands Versa’s content inspection and analysis to help organizations detect, understand, and protect sensitive data across multiple file types, workflows, and manipulation techniques — reducing exposure risk from both malicious activity and accidental data leakage before data is exposed or exfiltrated. Enhancements include:

• AI-enhanced OCR: Detects and analyzes text embedded within images, PDFs, and presentation files, restoring visibility into content that commonly bypasses traditional controls and helping organizations protect sensitive information across cloud, SaaS, and AI-driven environments.

• AI-enabled contextual DLP: Uses AI-based text analysis to identify sensitive data with greater accuracy, reduce false positives, and detect manipulation techniques designed to evade traditional DLP — strengthening protection across distributed environments and modern application workflows.

AI-Powered Operations, Analytics, and Observability

Versa has enhanced its operational workflow capabilities using AI to recognize traffic and behavioral patterns, correlate related events, and surface insights faster — helping teams move from an overwhelming number of alerts to root cause more quickly across networking, security, and user experience domains. Enhancements include:

• AI-correlated alert and event insights across key domains: Network and security events can often create “cascades” of alerts or alarms. Intelligent correlation and root-cause event analysis automatically suppresses and groups these alerts and alarms, reducing “noise” in the environment while clearly explaining the underlying cause of related alarms. This AI-powered capability operates across:

• Networking: Link failures, routing instability, and connectivity degradation
• Network security: DPI-based traffic inspection, signature-driven anomaly detection, and intelligent classification of unknown traffic
• Security: Large or anomalous file uploads/downloads and potential data-exfiltration patterns
• User experience: Bandwidth contention, latency spikes, and performance degradation

• Agentic AI-guided troubleshooting

Versa’s AI-powered co-pilot (Verbo) has been enhanced with agentic AI capabilities using Versa’s MCP integration to deliver issue identification, guided troubleshooting, and recommended actions with conversational access to guidance without switching tools.

AI-Ready Edge Infrastructure

Versa strengthened its platform to support emerging requirements to deploy “edge AI” workloads natively across distributed environments. Enhancements include:

• AI-ready software architecture: Versa’s uCPE (Universal Customer Premises Equipment) capability now supports containerized services within service chains, giving enterprises the flexibility to introduce and scale AI-driven capabilities on their existing infrastructure.

• AI-enabled operating system foundation: Support for Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux kernel 6.8 provides an OS foundation that improves compatibility with SoC-based hardware and widely adopted AI frameworks. Because SoCs are common in network appliances, edge platforms, and AI inference devices — and Ubuntu 22.04 has become a standard baseline across modern AI ecosystems — this enables reliable AI-driven classification, anomaly detection, and contextual analysis for use cases such as data loss prevention and observability.

Supporting Analyst, Customer, and Partner Quotes

“As enterprises move from AI pilots to production, they need an architecture that can support distributed AI workloads without introducing risk or operational overhead,” said Brad LaPorte, Gartner veteran and strategic advisor. “Versa’s unified SASE platform provides the AI-ready foundation to deploy, protect, and operate AI across branch, campus, and cloud, with consistent policy enforcement and visibility. That’s what enables organizations to scale AI faster, with more control and fewer gaps than stitched-together approaches.”

“As enterprises move from AI pilots to production, the real challenge is no longer experimentation — it’s operating AI at scale without increasing data risk or operational complexity. Distributed environments demand architectures that provide consistent policy enforcement, clear visibility, and resilience by design. The organizations that succeed will be those that simplify their foundations while maintaining control as AI becomes embedded across the business,” said Richard Rivest, senior manager, network engineering at Backblaze.

“Our customers are asking how to adopt AI faster without introducing new risk or complexity. The market is demanding unified platforms that can support AI workloads securely across distributed environments. That’s the direction enterprises are heading — and partners need to be ready to help them get there,” said Kent MacDonald, strategic alliances, Calgary-based Long View Systems, a leading North American provider of IT solutions and managed services.

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