SD-WAN brings cloud scalability, performance, and agility to your WAN. Using an application-driven approach steers traffic across the best path for every application.
This enables businesses to meet their diverse WAN needs with a flexible, cost-effective network. It also delivers a secure, high-quality user experience to employees.
Network Segmentation
Network segmentation enables businesses to protect their most sensitive information by limiting access to it to a handful of users. This helps prevent data breaches and minimizes the time it takes to identify who’s responsible for a security incident infosportsworld.
Network security teams can also use network segmentation to isolate and control traffic flow between subnets based on granular policies. Segmented networks are easier to monitor and help keep ransomware from spreading throughout the entire network, giving IT time to respond quickly.
In addition, segmentation can also reduce the amount of lateral communication between servers within a single segment. This intra-segment traffic would be limited to communication between hosts, applications, and endpoints that meet a set of specific permissions.
Moreover, network segmentation allows organizations to separate business-critical traffic from guest web browsing traffic on their networks, helping them prioritize which applications need the most attention and allocate resources accordingly. It also limits the risk of confidential corporate data falling into the wrong hands, such as malicious guests or contractors logging into an organization’s network with guest credentials.
Network segmentation requires thorough user and role identification before being implemented. This ensures that no sensitive information will fall into the wrong hands, preventing costly data breaches.
Security
SD-WAN is vital to any secure connectivity strategy, helping businesses access cloud resources and connect directly to endpoints for optimized business performance. It also helps to minimize the impact of data loss caused by misconfiguration, ensuring reliable secure connectivity solutions and better performance for all network users.
The main benefit of SD-WAN is its ability to deliver significant application performance, especially for mission-critical applications – such as voice-over IP or video conferencing – without compromising on security. This is because the technology dynamically shifts traffic to accommodate the different requirements of individual applications, automatically failover to a second path in the event of failure or congestion thebirdsworld.
This allows data to travel multiple channels simultaneously, boosting performance and reducing latency. It also helps to reduce the reliance on MPLS connections as it sends less-critical data over cheaper public internet links.
Another critical feature of SD-WAN is its security, which uses VPN tunnels, IPsec, next-generation firewalls, and micro-segmentation of application traffic. The software that coordinates these elements ensures a comprehensive overview of the network, allowing security teams to identify and resolve issues quickly.
A significant challenge in implementing SD-WAN is overcoming resistance from security teams, which may be reluctant to adopt new technologies such as zero-touch provisioning or cryptography keys. However, the benefits of SD-WAN make it worth the effort for most companies, significantly as it can help improve business productivity and customer satisfaction.
Application Optimization
As more businesses adopt cloud technologies, their network infrastructure must support their business applications and deliver peak performance at all times. This requires a framework of technologies that can improve user experience and use limited resources better.
Application optimization is an iterative process that involves profiling software to identify performance bottlenecks and then recommending changes. However, this manual process could be faster, more non-exhaustive, and susceptible to human bias.
SD-WAN takes WAN optimization one step further by leveraging dynamic path selection, traffic steering, and application prioritization to improve data transfer speeds and increase application availability. These capabilities ensure that data reaches the right destination at the right time.
Unlike traditional WANs, SD-WANs can pick and mix access technologies, carriers, and hardware to support specific WAN needs. This allows companies to prioritize traffic and reduce costs using lower priority.
Additionally, SD-WAN offers proactive network management that reacts to real-time WAN conditions by deploying dynamic best-path routing. If an underlying link fails, it automatically forwards user traffic to another available connection.
This ability to monitor WAN performance and remediate degradation as quickly as possible ensures that users aren’t negatively affected when a faulty WAN link causes disruptions in the application. It also helps to prevent costly downtime that could result from a network attack.
Scalability
Often, a company’s network needs to scale up as it grows. This translates to more capacity and bandwidth, as well as more users. A scalable network allows the company to grow without compromising performance or costs.
Businesses that need to increase their connectivity and data capacity can benefit from SD-WAN technology. It provides flexible connections for cloud-based applications, remote offices, branch locations, and mobile devices.
With SD-WAN, companies can prioritize traffic, which gives speed and bandwidth to more critical applications like voice calls or video streams. This helps to ensure that users have a positive experience with their network.
This type of scalability benefits businesses that need to connect employees in multiple locations. A scalable network can also help companies improve their customer service and operations.
In addition, scalability can also provide additional security. For example, if someone were to intercept a sensitive data stream while it was traveling across the internet, they would not be able to access it. This is important for businesses that deal with sensitive information.
Using an SD-WAN can also allow businesses to manage their networks more efficiently. As a result, they can respond to changing operational requirements faster and more effectively. This can save time and money and make the business more efficient overall.