‘Partners have a tremendous opportunity … the market is moving to sovereign services [and partners] have got to really see which providers are offering true sovereign services and make data sovereignty a point inside their sales pitch to differentiate themselves against the others,’ Kelly Ahuja, Versa’s CEO, says of the company’s new sovereign SASE-as-a-Service offering.
A year after Versa introduced its sovereign SASE model, the stand-alone SASE specialist is rolling out what it is calling the world’s first sovereign SASE-as-a-Service offering.
Sovereign SASE is a framework that lets organizations maintain control over their sensitive data while meeting data regulation and security restrictions. It’s a concept that’s especially appealing to specific verticals and industries, such as government agencies and critical infrastructure companies, but it’s also becoming increasingly requested by enterprises as they navigate the geopolitical environment and mounting privacy concerns, Kelly Ahuja, Versa’s CEO, told CRN.
“For the partners, it becomes something new in their kit,” Ahuja said of the new offering.
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Versa, which sees itself as a pioneer in converging networking and security, and thus, SASE, started to field more requests for sovereign infrastructure from its customers. In fact, between 85 percent and 90 percent of Versa’s top 100 customers today already have sovereign deployments in place, Ahuja said.
But it’s not just the largest customers with the highest security needs that have sovereign requirements anymore. It’s morphed into enterprises that are now worried about compliance, among other things, he said.
In the face of recent regulations like the U.S. CLOUD (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use Of Data) Act and the growing need for AI-ready security solutions, Versa in February 2025 launched its sovereign SASE model, a deployment model for VersaOne, a universal, AI-powered SASE platform that combines a range of security and connectivity products in a single place.
“We’ve actually been ramping up our ability to do sovereign deployments. What we did is we actually started to work with telcos around the world who wanted to offer sovereign services inside their country. But in addition, we have larger enterprises that are global, that have multiple jurisdictions to worry about,” Ahuja said.
These enterprises and their channel partners have had to build their own solution and manage it as well, he said.
But Versa doesn’t have a telecom partner in every country, so for these use cases the company decided it would build a sovereign SASE-as-a-Service offering that is compliant with the local jurisdiction, capable of data inspection and policy enforcement locally, and also includes local control, management and storage, Versa said.
It’s different than what many providers are offering that don’t have a gateway in-country and control and management might be going through a different jurisdiction, Ahuja said.
“The access to that sovereign cloud is not compliant with sovereignty requirements, and that creates a huge challenge,” he said. “The PoPs [points of presence] alone, the gateways alone, don’t make things sovereign. You actually have to make the control and management in that same jurisdiction as well. … Most of our competitors do not offer the ability to do sovereignty today.”
Sovereign SASE, said Ahuja, is opening new doors for channel partners.
“Sovereign SASE-as-a-Service built by Versa in-country—all partners can leverage and resell that with the peace of mind that they’re selling a sovereign service,” he said. “[Businesses] that don’t have the expertise can look for a partner and say, ‘Hey, can you give me a secure offering but I want sovereignty too because of the environment or my compliance needs or I’m regulated,’ [and] that’s when a partner can step in and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got a sovereign service, whether I’ve built it myself, or I’m working with a [provider] that has sovereign service today.’”
Sovereign SASE is already table stakes for some organizations and agencies, but it’s becoming critical for a larger swath of the market more quickly than even Ahuja realized.
“I always thought, defense, intelligence communities [and] banks would be attuned to that, but we’re actually seeing it broaden outside of that much quicker than I anticipated,” he said. “Partners have a tremendous opportunity … the market is moving to sovereign services [and partners] have got to really see which providers are offering true sovereign services and make data sovereignty a point inside their sales pitch to differentiate themselves against the others.”
