Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is rapidly replacing the traditional WAN for remote office and branch deployments. SD-WAN was designed to provide a wide range of benefits to support digital innovation. However, far too many SD-WAN solutions lack critical networking and security features, requiring organizations to add complex and costly overlay solutions to manage and protect their SD-WAN deployments.
For example, one critical issue organizations face – especially when a large number of SD-WAN devices have been deployed – is orchestrating communications, workflows, and other traffic between branch offices. While a traditional WAN model is certainly inefficient from a bandwidth or application management perspective, its hub and spoke model for connecting remote environments is relatively simple to deploy and manage. Since SD-WAN enables direct connections to the internet, however, building a communications overlay requires a complex, fully meshed VPN solution that can be a nightmare to design, implement, and manage.
The best approach to addressing this and similar challenges, such as SD-WAN security, is through integration,
