SD-WAN offers networking professionals a more efficient way to secure and optimize WAN connectivity. They can add capabilities in minutes instead of days with a centralized management portal and reduce the time technicians spend on-site installations. Secure SD-WAN software-defined security delivers a seamless network overlay that intelligently interconnects branches, private data centers, and leading public clouds with a single governance model.
IDS/IPS
An IDS, or intrusion detection system, looks for potential attacks on a network and raises alerts. An IPS, on the other hand, takes action to prevent an attack from succeeding. For example, it might block incoming traffic or quarantine a malicious file. With SD-WAN, control, and management of WAN connectivity is centralized through a controller rather than in individual routers. This simplifies management and reduces time spent on configuration. In addition, an SD-WAN solution such as the one from Versa Networks supports various routing protocols and routing methodologies to provide flexibility and agility in deploying routes. A business-driven SD-WAN can overcome the impact of packet loss, latency, and jitter on application performance by prioritizing applications and using multiple forms of WAN transport services simultaneously. This helps businesses maintain a consistent quality of experience (QoE) for employees working at home, in the office, or on the go. An advanced SD-WAN can monitor underlay network connections, including LTE and broadband internet, and dynamically redirect traffic around poor-performing links. This helps enterprises eliminate the need to deploy costly dedicated backup WAN links. Additionally, it can speed up failover times to improve resiliency and productivity.
Security Policy Management
Security functions are necessary for any SD-WAN solution because they protect your network from attackers. Attackers will often attempt to exploit vulnerabilities within your devices or software, and IDS/IPS stops these attacks while they’re still gathering information. With a business-driven SD-WAN, you can use this threat detection to enforce comprehensive security policies configured centrally and deployed to all devices on your branch network. An advanced SD-WAN provides complete visibility in real-time into how the solution operates, enabling IT managers to make informed decisions and support digital transformation initiatives. Its granular network usage metrics offer unparalleled insight into how your network is used by VPN, device, location, and application. A leading SD-WAN solution combines networking and security services in a single platform to simplify deployment, reduce costs and improve operations. This is known as converged security and is an important feature when choosing an SD-WAN provider. An NGFW with UTM functions, a next-generation firewall, and robust WAN optimization are critical to ensuring a secure SD-WAN. They deliver functional capabilities, including routing, connectivity, WiFi, LTE, security, and a unified management interface. Ideally, this is delivered as a cloud-delivered service that offers a whole stack of infrastructure to provide a centralized and efficient way to manage a distributed WAN architecture.
Security Analytics
SD-WAN provides the flexibility to create network segments for different applications, guests, PCI, and other sensitive data, reducing your attack surface. It also offers application-aware routing, enabling you to use cloud services without sacrificing performance or security. Traditional WAN architecture requires that all data pass through centralized security appliances in data centers on their way to a final destination. This introduces additional points of vulnerability that hackers can exploit. With a modern SD-WAN, you can separate data from different networks and apply security policies unique to those segments, eliminating the need for a centralized network. Many of today’s leading SD-WAN solutions integrate a full security stack and provide advanced threat management capabilities to protect your organization from network threats. They use a combination of signature-based detection, which compares known threats to known activity, and anomaly-based detection, which compares definitions of expected normal behavior against observed events to identify deviations. Some of the leading SD-WAN platforms also offer granular traffic analysis, allowing you to see what applications use bandwidth and what connections they connect to on the Internet. This will enable you to identify applications sensitive to latency and packet loss and then optimize those apps for the WAN link. This feature also helps improve WAN performance by reducing bandwidth demands and improving data delivery to remote locations.
Security Monitoring
Unlike traditional Wide Area Network (WAN) setups, which use a mix of hardware infrastructure to direct data between multiple organization locations and a central data center, an SD-WAN uses software to optimize the network. This type of software-based optimization is agnostic to switching protocols and routes traffic by application. This approach reduces costs, increases application performance, and minimizes the need for costly MPLS or frame relay connections while providing greater security by limiting data flow to the most secure path. The best SD-WAN solutions include a next-generation firewall with integrated unified threat management and a built-in URL filtering engine that provides fast internet offloads. This native capability helps prevent malware and other threats from getting past the perimeter and into critical business processes and systems. In addition, SD-WAN can provide a system-defined path option that enables you to send data across an internal network instead of the public Internet, which can reduce latency and increase security and bandwidth efficiency. This can be especially helpful for sending sensitive information between two branches or offices and reducing the risk of a data breach. Finally, SD-WAN can be configured to allow changes to security policies and settings to roll out to devices throughout the network more quickly than would be possible with other types of networking configurations. This centralization helps ensure that all devices use the most up-to-date security profiles and limits the opportunity for errors that could otherwise lead to less effective security.
