The new normal of remote work is further driving the adoption of software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN).
By Doros Hadjizenonos, regional sales director at Fortinet
Even before the pandemic struck, SD-WAN was on an upward trajectory, according to IDC research, SD-WAN is one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market, poised to reach a quarter of a billion dollars in 2023, driven by factors including the need to support SaaS apps and multi- and hybrid-cloud usage.
However, SD-WAN does not automatically assure improved performance and security. In fact, many SD-WAN solutions lack critical networking and security features, requiring organisations to add complex and costly overlay solutions to manage and protect their deployments. These security solutions generally do not interoperate with each other, which can reduce visibility while leading to management and logistical burdens and overheads.
A critical issue organisations face – especially when a large number of SD-WAN devices have been deployed – is orchestrating communications, workflows, and other traffic between branch offices.
Since SD-WAN enables direct connections to the internet, building a communications overlay requires a complex, fully meshed VPN solution that can be a nightmare to design, implement, and manage.
Integration, automation and simplification
The solution to these challenges is to create an integrated management solution that takes a security-driven networking approach and weaves SD-WAN and security functionality into a single console that delivers a full visibility across the entire environment.
As a result, businesses can deploy security and networking as a single solution, not only supporting advanced routing protocols, such as load balancing and optimizing connections, but also providing advanced security. Without that integration, the branch will become the weakest link in an organization’s security chain.
A centralised SD-WAN orchestration and management can decrease threat remediation time from months to minutes by coordinating policy-based automated responses across the distributed security architecture, unlocking security workflows, and threat intelligence gathering and implementation. Thus, any detected incident alert sent with contextual awareness data from a branch allows a network administrator to quickly determine a course of action to protect the entire enterprise against a potential coordinated attack.
By blending enterprise-class security and branch networking capabilities into a single, centralised management and orchestration system, organisations not only dramatically reduce cyber risk, they also reduce management complexity and total cost of ownership for a more efficient and more productive organisation.