The Impact of SD-WAN Adoption
We haven’t seen a technology being adopted and make such an impact in our market than SD-WAN has over the last year. There are many factors to this, but the big three that are initially driving most discussions and are addressed by most of the vendors in the market today are:
How SD-WAN is changing the market
- Simplicity from deployment to management
- An initiative to reduce operational expenses
- WAN redundancy
The conversation begins to shift around security, and more specifically, protecting an increasing attack surface as DIA and broadband circuits are incorporated into the WAN and replacing private circuits.
In many traditional WAN environments either Internet bound traffic is backhauled through data centers via private circuits and then out larger Internet circuits protected with perimeter firewalls with advanced threat and malware protection services, or if they have local Internet at these sites they have next-generation firewalls providing that perimeter security.
Many SD-WAN vendors tout security by providing encryption across the SD-WAN fabric and basic stateful firewalling features, however, they lack the more advanced security features built into the typical firewalls of today.
