SD-WAN Basics

Introduction

SD-WAN is a great solution for Small and Medium enterprises to segregate the traffic that matters, from traffic that does not, to allow for their virtual private networks to successfully manage the load of important traffic sources whilst ignoring less important sources.

What was the problem?

Users in a SME Environment often have access to either a completely secure network with performance issues arising from having many users access the internet via VPN, or a completely insecure network across a variety of networks and access points outside of any corporate controls.

Why was SD-WAN invented?

SD-WAN attempts to solve a major problem, most web traffic used by end users in a corporate environment is not important for the IT department’s monitoring. Being able to segregate data and sessions on important sites against non-important sites provides businesses the ability to ignore unimportant data to focus on the data that matters.

Policy Enforcement

Policies on the cloud are difficult to properly define and access. For most users on Google Cloud, and Microsoft 365, there is a need for users to access these services in a secure manner, These users must have a private connection to be allowed to access their cloud services.

SD-WAN provides users with the enablement needed for agentless access to their cloud services, without having to toggle their VPN on or off as performance and convenience requirements changes in their daily work processes.

Compromizes that you can make

With user access control enforcable on the cloud platform itself, there are alternatives to having all of your users on your VPN, or to upgrade to a SD-WAN ready infrastructure.

User education on site access, or user system lockdown might provide an alternative solution as most users should not have access to higher rights.

Summary

SD-WAN provides a good solution across a variety of security and performance needs, without current networking providing the performance needs for VPN networking across a lage enterprise, SD-WAN give users access a secure user space without forcing them to have to consistently be inside a corporate environment when it is not required