Today’s IT environment of multiple clouds, hybrid work, and the exploding popularity of AI has given cybercriminals unprecedented opportunities for launching attacks — and the traditional arsenal of tools organizations use to stop them isn’t working.
The network perimeter has disappeared, and every new device, app, cloud connection, and AI tool expands the threat surface. Not surprisingly, the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found a 34% increase in the number of attackers exploiting vulnerabilities to gain network access and cause security breaches. Cybercriminals are also extending their reach by selling ransomware kits on the dark web and blasting out targeted, AI-generated phishing messages and malware at scale.
In response, organizations are doing what they’ve done for years, adding to the dozens of separate point products they use to manage various aspects of security. These range from network security tools like next-gen firewalls, secure web gateways, and intrusion prevention systems to identity and access management systems, endpoint protection platforms, and cloud access security brokers to encryption servers, data loss prevention tools, threat detection and response systems, and more…the list goes on and on.
The irony is, while many of these point systems work well on their own, deploying and managing them separately has created new security risks. Products are designed with different fundamental security assumptions. Each has a separate security policy and requires a specially trained administrator, making it difficult to coordinate security policies and use products together.
The result is a fragmented security infrastructure with inconsistent rules and poor visibility. Conflicting policies and uneven enforcement create the gaps cybercriminals love to exploit. Teams struggle to identify incoming threats, and critical minutes, hours, or even days elapse as they correlate datasets and develop a response.
This system is no match for today’s fast-moving, multifaceted threat environment. To deliver effective protection, organizations need to move from scattered tools to a unified platform. Uniting networking and security on a single platform reduces blind spots and provides full, real-time threat visibility across traffic, users, applications, and devices. When a platform is built right — with security and networking natively integrated — it can react to threats faster and apply inline and consistent policy enforcement in real time — everywhere.
However, not every “unified platform” lives up to its name, and CISOs must be aware of the differences. Building a fully integrated platform is tough, and many vendors simply bolt together different products that operate separately. Others offer “platformized” solutions, refactoring and integrating acquired products that may work today, but can’t adapt to tomorrow’s innovations.
VersaONE, a universal secure access service edge (SASE) platform, takes a different approach with a natively integrated platform that allows security teams to move beyond the limits of fragmented, static tools. Built-in AI continuously correlates massive volumes of network and security data, identifies anomalies and threats across the environment, and responds to incidents at machine speed. A single software stack enforces a unified policy framework for all users, devices, applications, and threats.
Zero trust network access at the heart of the platform ensures that no user, device, or application is implicitly trusted — ever. Instead, access is granted and modified based on real-time factors, such as identity, device posture, and behavior.
Additionally, users, devices, and applications are isolated into controlled microsegments, significantly reducing the risk of lateral movement and privilege escalation if an attacker breaches the network.
VersaONE is the future of security — an adaptive, easy-to-use, fully integrated platform. Versa’s Universal SASE approach represents a major leap forward from disjointed point solutions, just as cloud-based software supplanted the old castle-and-moat approach.
In the rapidly evolving world of security, can you afford to be left behind with fragmented tools? To learn how VersaONE can dynamically strengthen security while simplifying operations, visit us here.