By Charuhas Ghatge, Nuage Networks by Nokia
Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), a software approach managing wide-area networks, offer ease of deployment, central manageability, and reduced costs, and can improve connectivity to branch offices and cloud. End users are excited about SD-WAN because it enables them to manage and add network functionality using a cloud-first strategy for application access and delivery.
Compute resources and associated cloud services are exploding, and traditional enterprise network boundaries have expanded into the public cloud, branch locations, and intelligent edges. So, what does this all mean to the branch security? Cloud computing has created several challenges since networking and security are incompatible with the cloud-centric and mobile-first business models. The network is rigid and static. Security is heavily centered around the data center, fragmented across multiple domains of physical locations, cloud resources, and mobile users. Networking and security have created silos that were built and implemented decades ago, and new functionalities are added and patched in as needed in a haphazard way. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a new paradigm defined by Gartner that combines network and security into a single cloud-based service.
In this whitepaper, we will discuss SD-WAN security features and explain SASE – what is SASE, why is it needed, what does it comprise of and its deployment considerations.