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Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s September 13, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Amy Ariel, CMO and Etay Bogner, CEO of Meta Networks today.

Who’s Meta Networks?

Meta Networks is a remote access network provider. If you currently manage your own VPN concentrators or firewalls so that your remote workers can access the network, Meta Networks is a Network-as-a-Service alternative to that traditional VPN architecture familiar to many of us.

In this briefing, Meta Networks discussed their…

New Partnership With Talari

Talari is an SD-WAN provider for enterprises. Meta is providing remote access. Therefore, what you’ve got with the Talari/Meta partnership is a full-featured WAN solution. Talari provides the SD-WAN part, and Meta provides the software defined perimeter part. (That’s right, folks…software defined perimeter is a category now.)

How Does All Of This Work?

First, I’m going to assume you have a sense of what SD-WAN is all about. Your wide area network, multiple circuits terminated on a forwarding device at each of your sites, optimizing traffic in accordance with a policy you’ve defined. That includes forwarding traffic between branch offices and headquarters, as well as traffic to and from the cloud and cloud-based services.

SD-WAN, such as what Talari has, doesn’t usually give you remote access capability. You still need a VPN service for that. Enter Meta Networks.

Meta’s got a Network-as-a-Service. As a Meta Networks customers, you get a virtual network that assumes zero-trust. That is, a Meta network isn’t just about access. It’s also about strict policy control. That means that endpoints don’t get access to something on the network just because they connected and authenticated successfully. Rather, a network administrator sets a policy defining exactly what resources endpoints have access to. Meta tracks user identity of each remote endpoint based on the IPSEC overlay tunnel connecting it to your virtual Meta network.

Meta describe their network as a “sun” architecture. Think of that big bright thing in the sky that you sometimes see when leaving a data center to get coffee or go out for lunch. Meta imagines the sun as a ring connecting all of their global POPs together. Endpoints connect to the sun, like rays of light. Endpoints could be laptops or a device at your headquarters office. Or a Talari SD-WAN box.

Meta Described The Partnership As At Stage One

The integration is not very tight as yet. You’ll be managing a security policy for remote access users on the Meta side, and a network policy for your wide area network on the Talari side.

The magic here is the connection between your Talari appliances and your Meta Networks virtual network, giving you some traffic optimization to cloud for your remote access users, as well as secure access everywhere. A good way to think about what you end up with is an interconnected, remote access, wide area network that caters to security-conscious shops spread out over a large geographic area.

You’ll work with channel partners to bring the combined solution to life.

For More Information

…about these solutions, go to metanetworks.com and talari.com. You can also do a search on packetpushers.net for Meta Networks as well as Talari, where you can find more podcasts and articles we’ve created about these companies.