Continued cloud adoption and the new normal of hybrid work are driving organizations to accelerate improvements to their security architectures. Infrastructure leaders deploying SD-WAN are increasingly adopting Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) that converges security and network functions to optimize performance and deliver better security outcomes. However, they faced the challenge of aligning SD-WAN with the SASE initiative. The lack of tight integration with security services limits their ability to provide a fully converged SASE framework, leading to increased security risks, increased network downtime, and increased costs.
At the same time, the intent to provide SASE solutions leads customers to build multi-vendor solutions by tinkering with different solutions, resulting in increased cost and complexity. This piecemeal approach affects efficient collaboration within network and security teams and forces them to manage separate policy structures and frameworks, resulting in operational complexity. To realize all the benefits of SASE, organizations need to reliably and seamlessly migrate to a single-vendor solution that leverages the native integration of next-generation SD-WAN with cloud-delivered security services.
Your SASE Migration Success Checklist
Required by Infrastructure Leaders Create a successful SASE migration strategy while reducing the risk of implementing a suboptimal security framework. As part of evaluating both SD-WAN and security services, they should consider the following features that can significantly simplify their migration strategy, including
- Reliable connections to security services: IT administrators are forced to manually create connections to multiple security services to provide features like Secure Web Gateway (SWG) , Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) add operational complexity and cost. SD-WAN solutions should be able to simplify and fully automate the connection to such security services providing redundancy and high availability.
- Continued Trust with Zero Trust Guarantee: Zero Trust Architecture An “allow and ignore” model is traditionally implemented, where once access is granted, an application is permanently and implicitly trusted, leading to malicious activity during the permitted period. SD-WAN solutions should be tightly integrated with security services to ensure zero trust and provide true least privilege access and continuous trust verification for all users and applications.
- Connecting to Security Services at Scale: Infrastructure Leadership Players are constantly dealing with the complexity of managing multiple points of presence (POPs) and ensuring they are strategically located to effectively protect and optimize application performance. Enterprises should adopt SD-WAN connected to security services that leverage global reach across all geographies at scale, providing better uptime and lower latency for applications.
- Asset Application SLA: Traditional SD-WAN solutions cannot Application and network SLAs Automatic or accurate selection of cloud gateways/POPs resulting in suboptimal performance and potential outages.
Support flexible service consumption: SD-WAN solution Scenarios should provide a flexible consumption model that allows organizations to seamlessly distribute bandwidth across branch offices from an aggregated pool. This consumption model should seamlessly extend to the security services of organizations building a SASE architecture that protects and provides an improved user experience.
- Simplify with Unified Policy Framework: Try SASE of organizations struggle with separate policy structures for network and security configuration, management and support. As a result, without a shared policy framework, IT teams spend a lot of time correlating applications and policies across their network. As one of the key capabilities of SASE cloud-delivered services, SD-WAN should leverage the same policy framework and data lake along with firewall, secure web gateway, CASB, and ZTNA, making it easier to deploy and most efficient to operate with fewer configuration conflicts.
Single-vendor SASE solution
Organizations are looking to modernize and consolidate their network and security infrastructure into a single service that simplifies management and operations for all applications and users Provides least privileged access.
Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN is the industry’s only autonomous, integrated and secure next-generation SD-WAN solution. It integrates natively with Prisma Access and provides best-in-class security worldwide. Prisma SD-WAN enables customers to plan and migrate to their SASE plans with a single-vendor solution that provides a superior user experience and secure access anytime, anywhere.
Join us at SASE Converge 2022 from Palo Alto Networks, the industry-leading SASE conference. In this exclusive two-day virtual summit, you’ll hear from the brightest minds defining the future of SD-WAN, Zero Trust Network Access and SASE.
Shankar serves as Prisma Director of Product Management SD-WAN Product Line. Before joining Palo Alto Networks, he was the product management lead for Cisco’s multibillion-dollar enterprise branch-office routing portfolio. Shankar holds a master’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder.
