How networking and cloud security solutions have evolved to connect and protect users everywhere

No matter what market, industry, or regulatory challenges your organization has faced through the years, one thing is certain. Connecting and protecting your customers, employees, contractors, and partners wherever they work is always the goal, but the details are constantly evolving. That’s never been truer than in this remote, distributed, always-on world today.

The very networking and security landscape itself is shifting under our feet, evolving from a constellation of disparate point solutions to fully integrated, multifunction, cloud-delivered networking and security platforms. Organizations need to control and secure internet access, manage IT resources, and provide protection for roaming users while rationalizing IT infrastructure.

Limitations of traditional wide area network (WAN) technology have contributed to the forces driving network transformation: complexity, cost, performance speeds, and service disruptions. Organizations today need more control, flexibility, and centralized management of their WAN environments than multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) can offer.

Complexity, as an example, often makes network management and optimization a real migraine factory. Consider the task of configuring multiple routers connected to different circuits (as an example, an MPLS link and a broadband Internet link) to route network traffic.

Your broadband Internet connection may be running slowly during a given period, while your costly MPLS link is relatively uncongested and may be able to provide faster Internet connectivity. The inability to aggregate disparate links means wasted bandwidth capacity and lower employee satisfaction.

A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution can address these scenarios and provide other advanced routing capabilities to optimize your network traffic as needed.

Cisco SD-WAN is a secure, cloud-scale architecture that is open, programmable, and scalable. It quickly allows you to establish an SD-WAN overlay fabric to connect data centers, branches, campuses, and colocation facilities. This connection can improve network speed, security, and efficiency.

SD-WAN combines and optimizes traditional WAN technologies, such as MPLS and broadband Internet connections. The Cisco SD-WAN overlay fabric allows organizations to efficiently route network traffic to multiple remote branch locations, while providing enhanced monitoring and management capabilities. SD-WAN monitors network traffic across all available links in real-time and dynamically selects the best route for each data packet traversing the network.

The drive to improve network and application performance to the user has converged with the drive to secure the same user at the edge. A secure internet gateway (SIG) delivers a broad set of security from the cloud so organizations can protect users no matter where they are. It can easily scale to cover additional traffic and users more efficiently than previous technologies.

This convergence of networking and security functionality at the edge has led to an even more encompassing concept that Gartner has defined as secure access service edge (SASE). A SASE solution can secure the cloud, data center, and branch network edges and deliver a secure SD-WAN fabric across disparate connections.