Optimizing Your Network For The Cloud First World
Optimizing Your Network For The Cloud First World
Optimizing Your Network For The Cloud First World
72.3%
Even if your network is performing well today,
changing where and how apps, desktops, and data
are stored and delivered will fundamentally
reshape the volume and paths of traffic through
your WAN. But when you make WAN transformation
a part of your cloud project, you can reinvent
what’s possible — delivering operational agility Cloud users who have a mix of
and enhanced security — all at a reasonable cost. on-prem and off-prem1
1. Cost - It’s expensive and inefficient to make traffic backhaul to the data center through multiple
hops rather than going straight from each branch location out to the Internet or SaaS.
2. Performance - The data center detour also adds latency, slowing business apps and data. This is
especially damaging since digital workspace performance is the cornerstone of productivity in
the modern workplace.
82%
feel hindered by
network complexity
40%
say their network
only satisfies some
of their needs1
It brings new flexibility and control to the modern enterprise network, making it easy to securely connect
your branches directly. As a result, you no longer have to backhaul remote and branch site traffic,
potentially over long distances, to the central data center. Instead, you can maintain cost-effective, secure
connections directly to the Internet and SaaS applications from every location in your organization.
SD-WAN automatically recognizes Internet sites and individual SaaS applications with deep packet
inspection, thus allowing you to define policies for how individual applications or families of
applications are handled. You can choose what application traffic should immediately break out of the
branch to the Internet or SaaS and which should be sent back to the data center. You even have a say in
which applications are blocked or logged for all users or a subset of users.
And by making your network application-aware, SD-WAN enables a high level of security for Internet
use and cloud-based apps. Data moving across the WAN can be segregated by application or source,
including SaaS and web apps. Then it can be protected using contextual security policies designed
around the specific requirements and risk profile of each app and real-time context of each user.
The integrated SD-WAN firewall can work with the secure gateway of your choice in the cloud and
automatically block undesirable traffic by policy. You have the option to block or redirect SaaS traffic
from the branch to the data center or SWG for every user or a subset of users. What’s more, PSec
or GRE technologies can be used to build a secure tunnel to a Secure Web Gateway for firewall, URL
filtering, and usage tracking data.
SD-WAN empowers these businesses to meet the security and bandwidth requirements of both
customers and employees wherever and however they connect.
Enterprises offering guest Wi-Fi access or employee Internet access must meet two requirements:
• Ensuring a great experience for customer-facing apps and Internet browsing — when it can be
impossible to predict exactly how many customers will be using them at a given time.
• Making sure that staff can work productively regardless of customer bandwidth consumption
or employee personal Internet use — including for critical business applications and
communications systems.
SD-WAN is designed to allow direct Internet breakout from your branches and retail locations, thus
simplifying your network while providing a better user experience and reserving WAN bandwidth for
business applications.
• Securely connect all locations to the cloud using aggregated links to provide more bandwidth at
a lower cost.
• Apply app-specific, contextual security policies to maintain the right level of protection for each
type of app, traffic, and user.
• Prioritize critical business and customer-facing apps for the best possible performance to ensure that
personal Internet use and web browsing don’t compromise productivity and the customer experience.
• Create a better experience for all users through selection of the best path, local media caching,
and deep visibility into experience quality with an easy-to-use platform for monitoring,
troubleshooting, and data-driven policy tuning.
Greater efficiency
SD-WAN improves efficiency and scalability by simplifying the network, lowering the
cost of network connections, providing deep visibility into application performance, and
centralizing policy definitions.
Security
To support your move to the cloud, SD-WAN provides multi-layered security that allows you to
segregate data based on application or source, enforce secure access control with contextual
security policies, and block or direct individual applications according to your policies.
Source:
1. IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Citrix, “How do Organizations Plan to
Assure Application Delivery in a Multi-Cloud World?” October 2017
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