Versa Expands VersaONE Platform With AI-Driven Security, Operations, and Edge Infrastructure

Versa has rolled out a new release of its VersaONE Universal Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform, adding AI-driven capabilities across infrastructure, data protection, and operations to support enterprises in moving AI initiatives from pilot to production.

The update is aimed at CIOs and CISOs seeking to deploy AI workloads securely across branch, campus, and cloud environments while maintaining centralized visibility, consistent policy enforcement, and operational control. According to the company, the enhancements are designed to allow organizations to scale AI adoption without increasing data risk or operational overhead.

The release is now available as VersaONE Universal SASE Platform version 23.1.1.

Addressing AI Scale, Risk, and Operational Complexity

As enterprises embed AI into business processes, security and networking teams face growing challenges around data exposure, distributed infrastructure management, and alert fatigue. Versa’s latest release is positioned as a response to those pressures, combining AI-ready edge infrastructure with AI-assisted security and operational intelligence.

“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. “This VersaONE release brings AI-ready edge infrastructure, stronger data protection, and AI-powered operations together in a single SASE platform.”

AI-Enhanced Data Protection and DLP

One of the primary areas of focus in the new release is data protection, particularly as sensitive information increasingly flows through SaaS applications, cloud services, and AI-enabled workflows.

Versa has expanded its inspection and analysis capabilities to improve the detection of sensitive data across multiple formats and manipulation techniques. The company's goal is to address gaps in traditional rule-based data loss prevention (DLP) tools, which often struggle with modern content types and evasion tactics.

New and enhanced features include:

• AI-enhanced optical character recognition (OCR): Enables inspection of text embedded in images, PDFs, and presentation files, restoring visibility into content that can bypass conventional controls.

• AI-enabled contextual DLP: Applies AI-based text analysis to improve classification accuracy, reduce false positives, and identify attempts to disguise or manipulate sensitive data.

These capabilities are intended to help organizations reduce both accidental data leakage and malicious exfiltration before sensitive information leaves the environment.

AI-Powered Operations and Observability

Versa has also expanded its use of AI in operational workflows, analytics, and observability. The platform now uses AI to correlate traffic patterns, behavioral anomalies, and events across networking, security, and user experience domains.

A key enhancement is AI-driven alert correlation and root-cause analysis, designed to suppress redundant alerts and group related events into a clearer explanation of underlying issues. According to Versa, this capability spans:

• Networking: Link failures, routing instability, and connectivity degradation

• Network security: Deep packet inspection (DPI), anomaly detection, and classification of unknown traffic

• Security: Large or anomalous file transfers and potential data-exfiltration patterns

• User experience: Bandwidth contention, latency spikes, and application performance issues

The release also expands Versa’s AI-powered co-pilot, Verbo, with agentic AI capabilities. Using Versa’s MCP integration, Verbo can provide conversational access to issue identification, guided troubleshooting, and recommended actions without requiring operators to switch tools.

Building an AI-Ready Edge Architecture

To support emerging “edge AI” use cases, Versa has enhanced its platform architecture to enable AI workloads to run closer to where data is generated and consumed.

Updates include support for containerized services within Versa’s universal customer premises equipment (uCPE), enabling organizations to deploy AI-driven functions directly within service chains. The platform now also supports Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux kernel 6.8, improving compatibility with system-on-chip (SoC)–based hardware commonly used in network appliances and AI inference devices.

According to Versa, this operating system foundation aligns with widely adopted AI frameworks, enabling use cases such as AI-driven classification, anomaly detection, DLP, and observability at the network edge.

Industry Perspective

Industry observers say the ability to run and secure AI workloads consistently across distributed environments is becoming a critical requirement.

“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, a former Gartner analyst and strategic advisor. “A unified SASE platform provides the foundation to deploy, protect, and operate AI across branch, campus, and cloud with consistent visibility and policy enforcement.”

End users and partners echoed similar concerns around operational scale and complexity.

“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,” said Richard Rivest, senior manager of network engineering at Backblaze.

Kent MacDonald, strategic alliances at Long View Systems, added that customers are increasingly asking for unified platforms that support secure AI adoption across distributed environments.

Availability

The AI-driven enhancements are now available as part of the VersaONE Universal SASE Platform Release 23.1.1. Additional details are available through Versa’s published blogs on AI-enhanced DLP and AI-powered network operations.