Versa Unveils AI-Ready SASE to Secure the Enterprise AI Revolution

SANTA CLARA, CA – February 10, 2026 – By Laura Harris

Versa today announced a significant upgrade to its VersaONE Universal SASE Platform, integrating a suite of AI-driven capabilities designed to help enterprises navigate the turbulent waters of artificial intelligence adoption. The new release, 23.1.1, aims to provide a unified foundation for organizations to scale AI across distributed networks without introducing new security risks or operational bottlenecks, addressing a critical tension point for technology and security leaders worldwide.

As businesses rush to move AI from experimental pilots to full-scale production, CIOs and CISOs are grappling with how to accelerate innovation while simultaneously protecting sensitive data and preventing operational chaos. Versa's latest enhancements to its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform are engineered to address this challenge head-on, focusing on AI-enhanced data protection, AI-powered network operations, and an AI-ready edge infrastructure.

“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 at Versa, in a statement. “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.”

Redefining Data Protection in the AI Era

A central pillar of the new release is a dramatic overhaul of data protection capabilities, leveraging AI to combat modern data risks. Traditional Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools, often based on rigid rules and signatures, struggle to keep pace as sensitive information becomes embedded in images, documents, and the conversational prompts of AI workflows.

Versa is tackling this visibility gap with two key innovations:

• AI-Enhanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR): This feature allows the SASE platform to detect and analyze text embedded within images, PDFs, and presentation files. This restores visibility into content that commonly bypasses traditional security controls, preventing data leakage when sensitive information is shared in non-text formats.

• AI-Enabled Contextual DLP: Moving beyond simple keyword matching, this capability uses advanced AI-based text analysis, including transformer models and fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs), to identify sensitive data with far greater accuracy. By understanding the context and user behavior, the system can differentiate between legitimate data use and a potential breach, significantly reducing false positives and detecting sophisticated attempts to evade detection. Crucially, this analysis engine runs as a containerized microservice locally on SASE gateways, ensuring sensitive data is inspected without leaving the organization's secure infrastructure.

“As enterprises move from AI pilots to production, they need an architecture that can support distributed AI workloads without introducing risk or operational overhead,” commented Brad LaPorte, a 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.”

From Alert Overload to Actionable Intelligence

Beyond data protection, Versa is using AI to streamline network and security operations. IT teams are often inundated with a “cascade” of alerts from disparate systems, making it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of an issue. The new platform introduces intelligent correlation and root-cause event analysis to cut through this noise.

The system automatically recognizes traffic and behavioral patterns, correlates related events, and suppresses redundant alarms. This AI-powered capability spans networking (link failures, connectivity degradation), security (anomalous file transfers, potential exfiltration), and user experience (latency spikes, performance issues), helping teams move from an overwhelming number of alerts to a clear, actionable diagnosis.

This is further enhanced by an upgrade to Versa’s AI co-pilot, Verbo. Now equipped with agentic AI capabilities, Verbo can provide guided troubleshooting and recommend actions through a conversational interface. It integrates with Versa’s behavioral insights engine and uses a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing NetOps and SecOps teams to query the system using natural language via popular assistants like Microsoft Copilot or internal tools, eliminating the need to switch between different consoles.

Building the Foundation for Edge AI

The announcement also signals a strategic focus on the burgeoning field of edge AI, where processing occurs closer to the data source to reduce latency and bandwidth usage. Versa has fortified its platform to support these emerging workloads.

Versa’s Universal Customer Premises Equipment (uCPE) capability now supports containerized services, giving enterprises the flexibility to deploy and scale AI-driven applications directly on their existing edge infrastructure. Furthermore, the platform’s operating system foundation has been updated to support Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux kernel 6.8, improving compatibility with the SoC-based hardware and popular AI frameworks that are becoming standard in modern edge ecosystems.

This infrastructure readiness is crucial for use cases like real-time video analytics in a retail store or predictive maintenance on a factory floor, where immediate data processing is essential.

Navigating a Competitive AI-SASE Landscape

Versa’s move is part of a broader industry trend, as major SASE vendors race to infuse their platforms with AI to meet the demands of the modern enterprise. The announcement places Versa in direct competition with other industry giants that are pursuing similar strategies.

Palo Alto Networks, for instance, has enhanced its Prisma SASE platform with features to secure AI agent usage and protect against AI-powered threats. Fortinet has integrated its FortiAI generative AI assistant into its unified SASE solution to aid in network orchestration and troubleshooting. Meanwhile, Zscaler is leveraging its Zero Trust AI to analyze vast data sets for real-time threat identification and dynamic access control.

The common thread is the recognition that a unified platform is essential. “The organizations that succeed will be those that simplify their foundations while maintaining control as AI becomes embedded across the business,” noted Richard Rivest, senior manager of network engineering at Backblaze.

As AI continues its march from the data center to the cloud and the far edge of the network, the security and networking infrastructure that supports it must evolve. With this release, Versa is making a definitive statement that the future of enterprise security is not only unified and cloud-delivered but also intrinsically intelligent.