Renewing Your SD-WAN? Here’s What to Consider

The SD-WAN contract renewal period is an ideal time to review whether SD-WAN fits into your future plans. While SD-WAN is a powerful and cost-effective replacement for MPLS, enterprises need to make sure it answers their evolving needs, like cloud infrastructure, mitigating cyber risks, and enabling remote access from anywhere.

4 Things to Consider Before Renewing your SD-WAN Contract

Consideration #1: Security

Enterprises need to reduce their attack surface, ensuring that only required assets are accessible, and only to authorized users.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Does my SD-WAN solution include advanced security models like ZTNA?
• How does my SD-WAN’s security solution integrate with other point solutions?
• Does my SD-WAN solution offer threat prevention and decryption?

Consideration #2: Cloud Optimization

Traffic from and to the cloud needs to be optimized in terms of performance and security.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How does my SD-WAN solution manage multi-cloud environments?
• Does my SD-WAN solution provide migration capabilities?
• Can my SD-WAN solution scale according to my needs?

Consideration #3: Global Access

Enterprises need predictable and reliable transport to connect global locations to the cloud and data centers.

Questions to ask yourself:

• Does my SD-WAN solution provide a global infrastructure to ensure low latency and optimized routing?
• How does my SD-WAN solution ensure secure global access?
• Will my SD-WAN solution provide an alternative in case of a network outage?

Consideration #4: Remote Access

Remote access for employees and external vendors needs to be supported to ensure business agility.

Questions to ask yourself:

• How does my SD-WAN solution secure remote users?
• How does my SD-WAN solution ensure remote users get optimized performance?
• Does my SD-WAN solution protect from supply chain attacks?

SASE, the Next Step After SD-WAN

SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) provides value in areas where SD-WAN lacks. SASE is the next step after SD-WAN because it provides enterprises with all the point solutions’ advantages, but without the friction of integrating and maintaining them. SASE is a single platform that converges SD-WAN and network security into a single, cloud-native global service.
In fact, according to Gartner, by 2024, more than 60% of SD-WAN customers will have implemented a SASE architecture, compared to approximately 35% in 2020.

How SASE Answers Network and Security Requirements

Let’s see how SASE provides a solution for each of the considerations above.

Security – SASE’s converged, full security stack extends advanced and up-to-date security measures to all edges.

Cloud optimization – SASE provides frictionless and optimized cloud service with immediate scaling capabilities everywhere.

Global access – SASE PoPs deliver the service to users and locations that are nearest to them, as well as accelerating east-west and northbound traffic to the cloud.

Remote access – SASE delivers secure remote access, with the ability to instantly scale to address the new work-from-anywhere reality.

SD-WAN vs. SASE

After SD-WAN solves the branch-data center-edge challenge, SASE enables enterprises to globally expand their environment to the cloud in an optimized and secure manner.
Let’s see how the two compare:

How to Get Started with SASE

Cato is the world’s first SASE platform, converging SD-WAN and network security into a global cloud-native service. Cato optimizes and secures application access for all users and locations. Using Cato SASE Cloud, customers easily migrate from MPLS to SD-WAN, improve connectivity to on-premises and cloud applications, enable secure branch Internet access everywhere, and seamlessly integrate cloud data centers and remote users into the network with a zero-trust architecture. With Cato, your network and business are ready for whatever’s next. Start now.