The future of edge networking is evolving. With more businesses becoming distributed, adding locations, and supporting mobile workforces, they are relying on cloud services to support bandwidth-intensive video and communication tools and business-driving SaaS applications, and are looking for better protection from today’s cybercriminals. These factors are driving organizations to take a closer look at their wide area network (WAN), or how to deploy one.
There has been a fundamental shift in how people and organizations access applications and data. This shift has been focused on cloud — 62% of our data is accessed via the web today compared to just 25% 10 years ago. There has also been a significant pivot in where data is accessed from — users today are everywhere — traveling, visiting customers, working from home, in a branch office and at headquarters. This hybrid workforce doesn’t keep to a set schedule but may instead be working from anywhere, at any time, and from any device. Software defined-wide area networking (SD-WAN) and secure access service edge (SASE) are solutions that provide a wide range of underlying capabilities that help address this shift in how we work and where we work.
Meet changing enterprise needs
Technologies continue to evolve and so do the way we connect to them. Aside from DSL, Coax, fiber, or Metro Ethernet connecting to the internet, a business might have another diverse circuit to mitigate risk, and sometimes one or more dedicated connections from an office branch to a data center or the cloud. A business might add another protected circuit for additional resiliency and to alleviate any network congestion.
As companies expand and acquire more businesses, this typical network can get more complex and costly to manage. Because more organizations are making greater use of the cloud for IT, the risk of cyberattacks becomes more imminent with increasing numbers of circuits and connections to those cloud services. Security and networking are challenging to manage for businesses with limited IT resources and budget, but even more so with complex networking architecture, or if they lack deep security expertise.
Today, remote workforces are becoming more permanent as employees are dispersed over different geographic locations. This new way of working presents a different, diverse set of network challenges including prioritizing network traffic in branch offices and at home, security risks from personal, untrusted devices, sub-optimal traffic flow, inconsistent business application performance, and more.
Remote users need sufficient access to critical business applications to maintain productivity, especially collaboration and video conference apps like Microsoft Teams and WebEx, along with other critical SaaS applications like Salesforce.com. With increased network traffic, WANs need to be constantly adapted to meet the ever-increasing bandwidth requirements, but making those changes is time-consuming and expensive.
How is SD-WAN a solution?
Whether it’s connecting remote employees, adding/updating branches, implementing virtual desktops or any other edge initiative, SD-WAN provides greater options and flexibility than traditional network solutions. The performance advantages of SD-WAN make the solution well equipped to support remote work policies and enhanced security.
Supporting the edge
Compared to traditional networking solutions, SD-WAN makes it easier to quickly spin up new connections, choose the appropriate public or private connectivity with the requisite level of throughput to support that connection, all with the greater network reliability organizations require. This solution enhances performance whether it’s connecting remote employees, adding/updating branches, balancing connectivity loads, or implementing virtual desktops and other edge initiatives.
Going hybrid (cloud/on-premises IT)
While traditional router-centric networks were designed for the data center, SD-WAN easily supports hybrid IT infrastructures delivering access to applications hosted on-premises, in public or private clouds and SaaS solutions. SD-WAN is able to acquire the appropriate QoS and security policy for each class of application based on business needs.
Simplifying network administration
Administering networks is time-consuming and expensive, especially when expertise is in short supply and particularly when the IT landscape is heavily physical-equipment based. SD-WAN reduces your reliance on hard-to-find network engineering talent through features such as centralized configuration, zero-touch provisioning, and end-to-end orchestration. SD-WAN can automatically adapt in real time to network performance issues and deploy updates to locations in minutes instead of weeks or months, dramatically reducing time and effort associated with on-premises equipment upkeep.
Delivering network diversity
Making full use of multiple forms of WAN transport, public, private, fiber, wireless and more, SD-WAN provides the network diversity you need for performance and reliability. This solution automatically directs traffic to the right connection pathway to ensure the right level of performance to prevent interruptions to business-critical functions.
“The beauty of SD-WAN is that it delivers internet redundancy features and network resiliency,” said Duane Barnes, general manager and vice president of RapidScale, a global managed cloud services provider. “But it’s critical that organizations expect their SD-WAN providers or managed services providers (MSP) to fully understand their business – where are users working from, what applications are they using, what cloud solutions are they accessing, etc. – in order to get their money’s worth out of their SD-WAN deployment.”
SASE: The evolution of edge networking and security
As we rely on an increasingly distributed workforce, security at the edge becomes a burgeoning challenge. While SD-WAN enhances reliability and uptime through highly advanced network management and routing capabilities, and also a measure if improved security over on-premises physical devices, the growing concern over cyberattacks is driving organizations to seek out solutions where network routing and security capabilities are even more tightly integrated.
That’s where SASE comes in. SASE addresses this challenge by tightly converging network and security functions, making the robust security of users and devices the focal point of its operating model. SASE provides the appropriate level of security based on the needs of the user, device and application, and reduces the costs and complexity associated with managing a plethora of security and networking resources.
“As people are working from a coffee shop, from home, or a branch office, those networking environments tend to be complex or not as secure. SASE delivers benefits of both networking and security, taking customers to the next level of secured networks,” said Sanjay Uppal, general manager and senior vice president VMware – Service Provider & Edge Business Unit.
Furthermore, SASE helps reduce IT cost and complexity, packaging up four disparate security approaches into one fully managed solution. The solution also delivers users the same experience whether at home, in the office or traveling, supporting today’s hybrid workforces. Threat actors know that 75% of data and applications are accessed in the cloud. SASE provides security and improved networking beyond the traditional enterprise perimeter – for cloud, edge, remote working, and more – protecting users in a standardized way, no matter where they are accessing applications from.
“With the pandemic accelerating the work from home movement, we had a lot of CIOs and IT leaders really asking us for a strategy around securing endpoints, identities, and access to corporate resources, whether they were in the data center or cloud provider. SASE is key to solving those problems for our customers,” said Barnes.
Most importantly, SASE delivers “Zero Trust” security, so you know you are protected whether a user is on your network or using the public cloud, by initially and continually reverifying a user’s login credentials, application(s) and device. Gartner’s Initial Secure Access Service Edge Forecast predicts that SASE will be the dominant consumption model for WAN edge for new and refreshed deployment by 2023.
“Attack vectors are changing because almost everybody is now working from home or from a coffee shop, and people are also using non-business applications on their work devices so the attack surface has increased,” said Sanjay. “Adopting the Zero Trust approach where you trust nothing until users and devices prove themselves trustworthy is critical for network security. With SASE supporting this approach, organizations should really consider SASE as a key component to their IT strategies.”
Ready to take a multi-layered approach to your security posture? Modernize your network today with RapidScale SD-WAN and SASE.
RapidScale, a Cox Business Company, is the next-generation managed cloud services provider that aggregates best-in-class cloud technology under a single management portal, enabling IT to accomplish more and providing an exceptional end-user experience.
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