WiteSand Emerges from Stealth Mode to Reinvent Enterprise Network Infrastructure

WiteSand, the company bringing enterprise networking to the cloud, has launched out of stealth mode with several major customers.

Its experienced founding team previously delivered several successful networking startups including Insieme, Nuova Systems and Andiamo that were acquired for more than $2.2 billion, and it has raised $12.5 million in seed funding to date from institutional and angel investors.

In medium to large enterprises, networking has never been more complicated due to employee mobility and looming hybrid work environments. In many cases, each campus has a slightly different technology stack— one vendor for switches, another for network access control (NAC), another for Wireless LAN, and still others for network monitoring and flow analytics.

Managing those solutions tends to be on-premise, tedious and time-consuming, not to mention hard to troubleshoot due to numerous potential points of failure. Each component manages aspects of the network, but none have the complete picture.

“Cloud is the new network operating system,” said Praveen Jain, CEO of WiteSand. “This is the place to consolidate all your on-prem enterprise networking tools. This is the place to do boundless analytics. This is the place to enforce zero trust policies in the network. And, this is the single place to manage your worldwide locations with consistent policies.”

WiteSand has created the first cloud-native, multi-tenant solution that provides asset discovery, NAC, wired and wireless provisioning, monitoring, and flow analytics. The integrated offering can span global networks reaching campuses, remote offices, factories, logistics centers, retail sites, and much more. With WiteSand, all of the functionality that was previously contained within other tools is now available in a single cloud-based interface, and only the physical switches and access points remain on-premise.

WiteSand includes the industry's first Network Time Machine, a feature designed to reveal the complete history of events and changes in the network at any point in time. WiteSand achieved this by pairing the limitless power of the cloud with global visibility, correlation, analytics, and recent advances in AI/ML.

Once subscribed, enterprises can templatize their ideal campus configuration and policies in WiteSand one time, and deploy it in any other site with the click of the icon. With its flexible pricing model users can choose to deploy any or all of WiteSand’s features. Because WiteSand is vendor-agnostic, it is well suited for single-vendor or multi-vendor environments, brownfield and greenfield.

WiteSand is currently deployed by several companies to manage their enterprise campus networks. Planful, a leading financial planning and analysis (FP&A) cloud platform, chose WiteSand to address the threats introduced by its remote workforce returning to office environments post-pandemic. By using WiteSand’s cloud-based NAC, it found its problem identification was ten times faster, and the templatized approach reduced custom scripting by 90%.

“As we start to move back into the office and COVID starts to subside throughout our regional offices in the coming quarters, we can’t be sure they’ve followed security best practices at home and haven’t been exposed to potential threats,” said Hersh Mahavni, Planful’s Vice President of TechOps & Trust. “Because of those potentially insecure devices, we could be walking into the Wild West of all sorts of exploits, so we need something like WiteSand to help us contain and isolate any threats in an automated fashion.”

“Two of the markets in which WiteSand participates are large and growing,” said Chris DePuy, Technology Analyst and Founder of 650 Group. “In our June 7th Enhanced Network Access Control report, we forecasted that the NAC market will reach $1.1B in 2025. Additionally, in the first quarter 2021, revenues for cloud-managed enterprise Wireless LAN services accelerated to 38% Y/Y growth.”