With an increase in cyber-crimes across the globe, cyber threats are becoming disastrous for vulnerable victim organisations. Whether these are phishers, scammers, viruses or even bots, they can be very dangerous to corporate data. During the days of the pandemic, corporate data had become more vulnerable to cyber attacks with orders to work from home. Hackers across the world are exploiting remote working networks during these unfavorable times, taking advantage of very minor human errors and weak network security layers.
Due to the consequences of the spread of COVID-19, enterprises across the world had to devise new solutions for sustaining their businesses. Companies were forced to adopt digital solutions supportive of managing a remote workforce for continual running of their business activities by setting up remote home branches, facilitating work from home employees. This was the need of the hour, which accelerated the transition towards a cloud connected world; the pandemic has accelerated the pace of adopting digital transformation towards a multi-cloud strategy. The rapid pace of digital transformation can be inferred by the fact that, according to State of the Cloud reports of Flexera 2020, almost 90% of organisations are applying a multi-cloud solution for their businesses.
But the challenge of data security is still there in the days of remote working as the pandemic has entered its third year. This is thanks to SD–WAN, which managed to make business networks more efficient by new transport methods, improvements in cloud computing-based capabilities and organisational strategies. SD–WAN is in itself a logical answer to all the contemporary security threats due to its next generation cloud connected solutions.
Security Benefits of SD–WAN
Some of the security benefits of SD–WAN are described below:
- SD–WAN provides constant protection from branches to SaaS against all types of internal and external threats.
- It provides an enhanced user experience through secure and direct cloud access. It also provides secure and direct Internet access.
- With identity-based policy management and micro-segmentation, SD–WAN improves the overall efficiency of the network and increases reliability.
- SD–WAN enhances control over inbound, outbound and internal traffic via centralised visibility.
- It is a highly simplified solution. Its easy-to-deploy, simplified single product solution includes networking, the cloud, security and an all-in-one product, which also makes it highly cost efficient, free from sophistications.
Cloud-enabled security: a must have for all organisations
With an ever-increasing application of traffic transferring towards the cloud, many business users and customers are sharing files on the cloud, having virtual meetings and using other tools relying on bandwidth, for example, video and voice applications. For many organisations, it has become a major challenge to set up and manage both remote and branch offices simultaneously in parallel with accommodating customer needs securely, efficiently and in a cost-effective way.
Because of traditional WANs being incapable of supporting cloud-based applications, many of these organisations are now moving towards the software defined solution of WAN architecture to support cloud applications. It also helps them to manage and improve their connectivity from an all-in-one product i.e. a single dashboard. Such a cloud supportive approach requires a cloud-enabled security solution working in parallel with networking as a service (NaaS), for the development of a modernised networking infrastructure, which ought to be fully functional. Such a security approach must include:
- As a cloud service, it should provide a next generation solution for threat preventions.
- It must enable compliance measures for public cloud security.
- It must provide threat assessment and an enhanced protection system against all the possible threats for all the virtual networks.
SD–WAN provides leadership capabilities in networking as well as security. It offers multi-layer full stack security compliances, both in the cloud and on-premises. It is armed with an advanced security threat defense system providing integrated security to branches connected with multiple clouds including IaaS, SaaS, and data centres as well. It provides protection against all kinds of web attacks by offering a full security stack. Cyberthreats and security blind spots are detected, and the system is protected against these kinds of cyber-attacks by giving users the right to access cloud applications and the Internet from anywhere. Public Internet connections and highly intensified network webs are not secure in many applications. SD–WAN provides a safe and organised link between office/organisational branches and data centres through the service provider’s internal backbone. SD-WAN provides built-in security. It offers access to intelligent services that automatically identify and mitigate security threats. It reduces the amount of traffic that needs to go through security parameters to make vulnerable home connections secure enough for users working remotely outside the office premises.
The emergence of secure access service edge (SASE) has also made SD-WAN a networking platform capable of cloud-programming. SASE has also enabled SD-WAN to orchestrate the network. SASE components enable enterprises to adopt, manage and orchestrate the security components by managing them centrally with the software after plugging into the network. Such an approach offers enterprises the flexibility of adopting cloud-based security solutions fully applied with SD-WAN deployment.
In addition, SD-WAN offers a multi-layer security solution based primarily on four security categories including secure web gateway, enterprise firewall, micro-segmentation and DNS layer security. These above-mentioned security categories are further made up of multiple combinations of security features. For example, identity-based policy management, IPS, IPsec encryption, malware protection, URL filtering and SSL or TLS decryption. While cloud access security broker (CASB) provides further protection to the cloud application ecosystem against any breaches, account compromises and any other security threats. This is how SD-WAN provides secure cloud access and data protection.
Conclusion:
The advanced capabilities of SD-WAN have enabled enterprises to make a safe, secure and simplified journey towards integration of their wide area networking with multi-cloud service providers. It also assures the highest level of performance for SaaS applications, which are mission critical. SD-WAN has made it easy to integrate WAN applications and has extended them to be hosted on a public cloud environment. Orchestration of the security services of the cloud, hosted by security vendors, is made easier with SD-WAN. Furthermore, cyberthreats faced by enterprises while digitally transforming towards the cloud have also been minimised due to full stack multi-layer security compliances offered by SD- WAN.
SD–WAN for multi-cloud is the new approach to maintain secure and high-quality connections between laaS workloads running on multiple clouds. It automates the network across different cloud networks, reducing complexity and increasing agility to save time. While optimising the application user experience, the SD–WAN solution provides connectivity and security across diverse cloud infrastructures. Now, campus-to-cloud, datacenter-to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud cost effective solutions are securely delivered by SD–WAN.
If you would like more information on how to implement SASE or request a Proof-of-Concept then have a look at our Managed SASE solution.
