SD-WAN + Firewall
what is sd-wan?
Despite the technological advancements that ushered in a new digital age, many aspects of traditional enterprise IT networks remain essentially unchanged. Fortunately, a new option has emerged that’s helping businesses of all sizes optimize their IT networks. It’s called Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), it is a software-defined approach toward bringing wide area networking to organizations seeking more diversity and control over their enterprise WAN, as well as Local Area Network (LAN)-like features at a broader scale.
Software-defined WAN, or simply known as SD-WAN, is the next evolution of enterprise WAN technology. SD-WAN is similar to software-defined networking (SDN) in that it uses software to manage and control network resources and services. However, SD-WAN focuses explicitly on WANs.
WAN is, in a nutshell, any form of telecommunications network where information travels between devices in different locations via either virtual private networks (VPNs), lines, or wireless networks. If WAN didn’t exist, for instance, enterprise connection would be restricted to specific areas or geographic regions. As businesses grow and become global organizations, WAN allows them to share data between branches and stay connected.
Historically, the two most popular WAN connectivity options have been MPLS and broadband Internet. Businesses have tended to prefer MPLS, as it is essentially a private network, and therefore considered reliable and secure. However, as previously said, MPLS is not designed to handle the high volumes of WAN traffic that result from SaaS applications and cloud adoption. In addition, because of its private aspect, it is also an expensive network solution.
SD-WAN is a newer approach to WAN. It’s a product (not a network infrastructure) that acts as an overlay for companies’ existing network solution (may it be MPLS, broadband Internet or a hybrid model), separating the network control and management processes from the underlying hardware and making them available, as the name suggests, as software, just like any application. By using a centralized control function, it securely and intelligently steers traffic across multiple sites, adjusting bandwidth where it’s needed most. This allows enterprises to enjoy the spoils of broadband without uprooting everything from the ground.
SD-WAN also incorporates a traditional hardware-based networking model and adds a software-defined virtual network overlay on top. This overlay is managed and provisioned centrally by a controller, removing the need for device-by-device network configuration and management. The underlay, or data plane, is then left with the responsibility to process and transit packets between devices.
The overlay can run over a range of standard network transport services, including the public internet, 4G, 5G, and MPLS. Based on the performance of the underlying network transport, application-aware routing will control where and when an application uses a specific service to maintain the performance of real-time and sensitive applications.
SD-WAN Benefits for business - 6 advantages over MPLS
The Internet has been around long before the world first heard of SD-WAN and its benefits. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that millions of homes and offices connected through broadband to the Web on a 24/7 basis. To adapt to an increasing demand of Internet connectivity and guarantee stable networks, enterprises, since then, have opted for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) solutions.
Fundamentally, MPLS allows a router to place a ‘label’ on packets of Internet traffic, each label explaining where the information needs to go next. This, in turn, reduces processing time at each router – a speed augmentation that was welcomed by big business twenty years ago.
But the year is 2022, and the challenges businesses face today are unprecedented to say the least. In the early 2000s, digital transformation was unknown, corporate applications were not in the cloud, and users were not accessing the Internet from mobile devices. MPLS was an adequate solution for yesterday’s challenges, but not todays. Cloud-fuelled global enterprises demand a high-performance, application-agnostic managed network solution – that’s where SD-WAN comes into play.
What are the benefits of SD-WAN for your business?
SD-WAN presents a flexible option for those looking for an alternative to MPLS or hybrid network configurations. That’s because SD-WAN can manage multiple types of connections – including MPLS and broadband – and route traffic over the best path in real-time. Virtualizing your business network can result in endless benefits. Let’s have a look at each below:
Better Network Management
SD-WAN introduces a network overlay that lets businesses respond to changing operational needs quickly. Since it doesn’t rely on the underlay (it’s a virtual network solution), it can be rapidly deployed and adjusted to the customer’s needs.
Company-wide connectivity requirements can be orchestrated from a central management dashboard that offers full network visibility across branches. By having a 360, real-time view of their business Internet performance, companies have full control of their network, and can provide better network performance as the situation demands.
End-to-End Encryption
MPLS functions via a private network. This avoids security pitfalls, but limitations to network connectivity remain. Direct access to the public Internet, in turn, can be used to improve user experience, but presents safety concerns.
SD-WAN is secure by design, meaning encrypted end-to-end tunnels (128 bits and up) are built across the whole network (whether 0% or 100% of it is carried on public infrastructure). This makes a great base for businesses’ in-house firewall or access gateways and doesn’t rule out additional security at authentication or application levels.
Better Network Management
SD-WAN introduces a network overlay that lets businesses respond to changing operational needs quickly. Since it doesn’t rely on the underlay (it’s a virtual network solution), it can be rapidly deployed and adjusted to the customer’s needs.
Company-wide connectivity requirements can be orchestrated from a central management dashboard that offers full network visibility across branches. By having a 360, real-time view of their business Internet performance, companies have full control of their network, and can provide better network performance as the situation demands.
SD-WAN enables Cloud Access
Businesses are increasingly deploying latency-sensitive applications onto the Cloud. It makes their workforce more agile, collaborative, and productive, ultimately increasing their competitive advantage.
With many enterprises now making use of multi-cloud environments, complexity has skyrocketed to such an extent that only an SD-WAN solution can manage it.
SD-WAN introduces dynamic capabilities to enhance connectivity to the Cloud, enabling the use of multiple underlay links to manage and steer user traffic depending on the best performing path, the type of data (voice, video, etc.), and its destination.
A more efficient solution for global networks
SD-WAN customers are not locked into an overarching network or have to pay for superfluous services, which in turn makes SD-WAN a much cheaper option than traditional WANs such as MPLS. In fact, we have seen an average reduction of about 40% in fees when companies make the switch to SD-WAN.
That’s mainly because SD-WAN allows companies to pick-and-mix access technologies, carriers, hardware and other network components to suit specific needs. For example, both Internet broadband and mobile 4G are typically cheap connectivity options. By choosing those links for certain types of low-priority traffic, instead of the expensive MPLS network, companies can significantly reduce budget.
Less downtime for your business
As mentioned before, SD-WAN leverages multiple network links to enhance user experience. However, it’s worth mentioning it also improves site reliability. A secure overlay provided by SD-WAN can combine a highly personalized and diversified mixture of network links to create a safety net and virtually eliminate the fear of network outages. In a nutshell, SD-WAN allows businesses to “supercharge” their network, making it more secure and resilient.
All benefits combined create an impact
For all the reasons mentioned above, SD-WAN can have a huge impact on business operations and consequently its turnover. It ensures that company services remain at peak levels — determined by business priority, not as dictated by network hardware. And, in times when competitors are only a click away, a minor delay in response time is the fine line between a new lead and a lost opportunity.
But more than that, network connectivity should be treated as the very foundation upon which the rest of a company’s agile work environment will be built. With SD-WAN, organizations not only future-proof themselves, but they can also enjoy a plethora of new skills and an excellent return on investment.
what is sd-wan?
SD-WAN is a software-defined approach to managing the WAN.
Key advantages include:
- Reducing costs with transport independence across MPLS, 4G/5G LTE, and other connection types.
- Improving application performance and increasing agility.
- Optimizing user experience and efficiency for software-as-a-service (SaaS) and public-cloud applications.
- Simplifying operations with automation and cloud-based management.
The traditional WAN (wide-area network) function was to connect users at the branch or campus to applications hosted on servers in the data center. Typically, dedicated MPLS circuits were used to help ensure security and reliable connectivity. This doesn’t work in a cloud-centric world.
Today’s IT challenges
Times have changed. As businesses adopt the use of SaaS and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) applications in multiple clouds, IT is realizing that the user application experience is poor. That is because WANs designed for a different era are not ready for the unprecedented explosion of WAN traffic that cloud adoption brings. That traffic causes management complexity, application-performance unpredictability, and data vulnerability.
Further, opening the enterprise to the Internet and the cloud exposes major threat and compliance issues. It is extremely challenging to protect the critical assets of an enterprise when applications are accessed by a diverse workforce, including employees, partners, contractors, vendors, and guests. Enabling broadband on the WAN makes the security requirements more acute, creating challenges for IT in balancing user experience, security, and complexity.
The new WAN
New business models drive the need for a new network model.
SD-WAN addresses the current IT challenges. This new approach to network connectivity can lower operational costs and improve resource usage for multisite deployments. Network administrators can use bandwidth more efficiently and can help ensure high levels of performance for critical applications without sacrificing security or data privacy.
The traditional WAN architecture was limited to enterprise, branch, and data center. Once an organization adopts cloud-based applications in the form of SaaS and IaaS, its WAN architecture experiences an explosion of traffic accessing applications distributed across the globe.
These changes have multiple implications for IT. Employee productivity may be compromised by SaaS-application performance problems. WAN expenses can rise with inefficient use of dedicated and backup circuits. IT fights a daily, complex battle of connecting multiple types of users with multiple types of devices to multiple cloud environments.
With SD-WAN, IT can deliver routing, threat protection, efficient offloading of expensive circuits, and simplification of WAN network management. Business benefits can include the following:
Better application experience
- High availability, with predictable service, for all critical enterprise applications
- Multiple hybrid active-active links for all network scenarios
- Dynamically routed application traffic with application-aware routing, for efficient delivery and improved user experience
- Improved OpEx, replacing expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) services with more economical and flexible broadband (including secure VPN connections)
More security
- Application-aware policies with end-to-end segmentation and real-time access control
- Integrated threat protection enforced at the right place
- Secure traffic across broadband Internet and into the cloud
- Distribute security to the branch and remote endpoints with NGFW, DNS security, and NGAV
Optimized cloud connectivity
- Seamless extension of the WAN to multiple public clouds
- Real-time optimized performance for Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, and other major SaaS applications
- Optimized workflows for cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure
Simplified management
- A single, centralized, cloud-delivered management dashboard for configuration and management of WAN, cloud, and security
- Template-based, zero-touch provisioning for all locations: branch, campus, and cloud
- Detailed reporting of application and WAN performance for business analytics and bandwidth forcasting
SD-WAN evolved from MPLS technology, which has powered private connectivity for more than two decades. In many ways, SD-WAN can be seen as a software abstraction of MPLS technology that’s applicable to wider scenarios: It brings secure, private connectivity that’s agnostic to all kinds of links and providers and is cloud-aware. While MPLS handled failure scenarios with backup links, SD-WAN handles them with real-time traffic steering based on centralized policy. Also, since SD-WAN unifies the entire WAN backbone, it delivers comprehensive analytics across the network globally. This wasn’t possible before, because of disparate pieces of infrastructure and policy.
SD-WAN can be seen as SDN for the WAN. It represents, arguably, the most popular and widely deployed use case in SDN. The SDN model became popular for abstracting network infrastructure in the data center and other sections within the enterprise perimeter. SD-WAN played a similar role but needed to abstract infrastructure elements that were diverse in terms of link types, providers, and geographies. Since it crossed the enterprise perimeter, it needed a robust security component as well.