Secure SD-WAN is the future of networking for global organizations. It provides WAN simplification, lower costs, bandwidth efficiency, and a seamless on-ramp to the cloud for critical applications without sacrificing security or data privacy.
For distributed environments like healthcare, it helps connect remote locations with high-quality connectivity for large file transfers and ensures compliance, privacy and security. It also helps with application optimization to prevent latency and packet loss issues from affecting end-user performance.
Scalability
Networks and security requirements have changed as businesses have expanded and adopted remote offices and cloud infrastructure. Historically, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) links have been used to connect these locations and enable high-performance access to corporate data centers and cloud applications.
SD-WAN allows companies to consolidate multiple network devices while delivering unparalleled agility, security and performance. Through centralized management and zero-touch provisioning, SD-WAN reduces OPEX while enabling rapid deployment and automated network administration.
Scalability is critical to ensuring that SD-WAN can handle growing business demands. It can also allow companies to add branches, applications and services simply and cost-effectively without installing and managing many network appliances at each location.
In addition, security and networking professionals must work together to design comprehensive security policies with scalability in mind. This requires centralized visibility into network and security functionality so that bandwidth can scale up and down and connections can dynamically adjust to fluctuations in availability without ever leaving security behind.
With this in mind, companies must look for a Secure SD-WAN solution such as those from Versa Networks that offers built-in security capabilities, such as firewalls and VPN functions. In addition, many SD-WAN solutions offer threat intelligence features that help administrators better identify and respond to attacks before they become a problem.
Cost-Effectiveness
One of the main challenges for organizations is ensuring they have enough capacity to support their growth. Traditionally, this has been an expensive and rigid task that can be difficult to scale and manage effectively.
Secure SD-WAN is a cost-effective solution for improving network performance. Because it allows routing to be dynamic, traffic can be directed through the most efficient route for each data type. This can help avoid congestion, ensuring critical applications such as videoconferencing receive the necessary resources.
Another cost-effective way that Secure SD-WAN can benefit your business is by reducing network complexity. With centralized control and virtualized edges, there is less need for IT teams to configure and maintain additional hardware at the branches.
As a result, Secure SD-WAN can help reduce overall costs by eliminating the need for dedicated hardware. This also allows for easier management and faster deployment.
In addition, Secure SD-WAN can improve security by providing end-to-end encryption as a standard feature. This can help to protect sensitive data such as credit card numbers or personal health records that travel across public networks.
Secure SD-WAN is the future of networking and should be considered by every business to ensure their network can perform as expected. Whether you need to support healthcare records, banking systems, retail POS systems, airline reservations or transportation logistics, Secure SD-WAN can help ensure these and other applications are secure, reliable and perform as expected.
Flexibility
Secure SD-WAN provides businesses with the flexibility to connect branch offices through a variety of network connections. It can use MPLS, internet or 5G through tunnel bonding and a dynamic path selection, providing scalability and redundancy while reducing jitter and packet loss often occurring in internet links.
This flexibility allows organizations to prioritize network traffic based on business intent and apply policy at the gateway level. This approach helps to optimize network performance and reduce bandwidth usage, increasing employee productivity and boosting staff morale.
Another way that Secure SD-WAN can improve network performance is by automatically steering traffic to the best available connection. This can mitigate latency and packet loss issues by facilitating real-time business applications such as VoIP, video and live chat.
In addition, it can automatically failover to more stable and reliable WAN links in case of a link failure or degradation. This proactive approach ensures network traffic isn’t disrupted and business-critical applications are always running.
Moreover, it also offers the option of replacing expensive MPLS connections with internet-only links by providing techniques to optimize and reduce jitter and packet loss that often occurs when using an internet connection.
Moreover, SD-WANs provide a high degree of security for sensitive data. They ensure that data is encrypted and only accessible to authorized devices. This can help protect a business against cyber threats resulting in unauthorized access to critical information.
Security
Security is an increasingly important aspect of network performance. Today, data and devices constantly move across the internet, putting companies at risk of breaches. SD-WAN solutions use encryption to protect the transmission of sensitive information and ensure that only authorized users can access it.
Secure SD-WAN also supports a cloud-first architecture and uses first packet identification to send trusted SaaS or web traffic directly to the internet. In contrast, unknown or untrusted traffic is service chained to SSE cloud services. This eliminates the need for backhauling traffic, improving application performance and ensuring uptime.
A secure SD-WAN solution also enables IT teams to reduce device footprint and enforce consistent policy across multiple branch locations. It improves application performance by selecting the best path and automatically steering traffic to the cloud.
IT teams can securely implement zero-trust network segmentation and identity-based access control security frameworks. These techniques segment user and IoT device traffic so that users and devices only reach network destinations consistent with their role in the business.
Secure SD-WAN’s security measures are designed to protect network traffic from attacks that compromised devices, or insecure networks could cause. These measures include virtual firewalls, malware detection, and granular visibility into the network. They also help IT teams identify and neutralize threats in real-time.
