SD-WAN is a software-defined approach to managing the wide-area network. A Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) uses a centralized control function to securely and intelligently direct traffic across a virtual WAN architecture.

This allows enterprises to leverage any combination of transport services – including MPLS, LTE and broadband internet services – to securely connect users to applications. In the past, a regular Wide Area Network (WAN) would be used to connect branch offices to a central corporate network, or to connect to remote data centres. These WAN connections would often rely on special proprietary hardware to function and operate.

SD-WANs take advantage of the internet or cloud-computing, and provides a software-based interface to monitor and manage the regular WAN functionsThis increases application performance, resulting in enhanced user experience, increased business productivity and reduced costs for IT.

Simplification:

Because SD-WAN operates on software, it allows us to eliminate a lot of the devices and CPE’s that have always existed at the edge of the network adding cost and complexity to those infrastructures.

Speed:

Gigabit speed on the last mile allows clients to move off lower speed legacy services like MPLS and eliminate bandwidth barriers at all their branch locations.

Flexible VPNs:

SD-WAN allows you to bring VPNs between sites or VPNs between sites and datacentres. It also allows you to have application-specific control across your entire network or on a site-by-site basis.

Easier Management:

SD-WAN comes with software-based routers and firewalls which allow you to simplify your network management and allow you to have simple, consistent and streamlined execution of router and firewall policies across the network.

Agility:

The rapid rollout of WAN services to remote offices without the need for on-site IT support. The bandwidth can easily be adjusted (increased or decreased) depending on business needs.

Bandwidth savings:

Internet connections are readily available, quick to deploy, and comes at a much lower cost than equivalent MPLS networks. SD-WAN provides the reliability and security benefits of WAN services at “Internet prices”.

SD-WANs take advantage of the internet or cloud-computing, and provides a software-based interface to monitor and manage the regular WAN functionsThis increases application performance, resulting in enhanced user experience, increased business productivity and reduced costs for IT.

Sky-WAN enhances the SASE platform by offering next-generation firewall (NGFW), secure remote access, and unified threat management (UTM) services that protects application and user activity across the enterprise WAN, branch, and private or public clouds. Organizations can finally secure their enterprise-wide networking while increasing multi-cloud application performance and dramatically driving down costs.

Sky-WAN Security increases protection for your on-premises, branch, or cloud applications and simplifies the interoperability of security and networking. Built inside of Sky-WAN SASE, Sky-WAN Security delivers a full suite of network security capabilities that are all centrally managed through a single pane of glass: allowing you to get visibility and enforce policies in real-time.

While the branch office has become an increasing area of cyber security risk over the last several years, many enterprises are not able to budget or support the needed security infrastructure. Add in the proliferation of managing branch sites, cloud applications, mobile and remote workers, unmanaged devices, organizations are facing an ever-growing attack surface.

Deploying advanced security in networks is often a challenge as well with organizations lacking sufficient IT personnel and skillset making the integration of 3rd party security products difficult and costly. Enterprise IT and security teams have the opportunity to both increase network security and simplify operations by migrating from proprietary security appliances to a software-defined approach that is directly embedded into your network: making security deployment and integration a non-issue.

Sky-WAN Security embedded into our flagship product, Sky-WAN SASE, gives organizations critical capabilities such as multi-tenancy, multi-service, elasticity and zero-touch provisioning. Multi-service capabilities and service chaining ensure that organizations can include critical security functions like next-generation firewall and secure web gateway that is easily integrated into their existing network infrastructure.

Sky-WAN has created broad set of virtualized security functions that run on commodity x86-based hardware, and that are open and fully programmable. Providers can create basic managed firewall services or rich multi-function services like unified threat management (UTM) that replace complex physical or virtual appliances. These services can operate on-premises, in the provider data center or cloud, public cloud or a combination of all. All of the security functionality is embedded directly into the network stacking: making Sky-WAN more cost effective than 3rd party or proprietary security hardware or software packages.

As you rearchitect your network to enable SD-WAN, you need consistent security across branches, clouds, and users.
Thin, rich, or full-stack routers embed simple or flexible SD-WAN and security functions to meet IT service, security, and compliance demands onsite.

Access and connectivity is secured over the public Internet with threat protection over all ports and performance assurance for multi-cloud apps
Get efficient authentication, strong encryption, and micro segmentation delivered through trustworthy systems and end-to-end threat protection.
Simplify threat prevention with the shortest time to threat detection.

Sky-WAN reduces the overall attack surface of your organization by ensuring that only safe traffic is allowed access to your sensitive systems, applications, and devices. Users can be granted access privileges based on their role and attack signatures can be identified to spot suspicious or malicious threats in or out of the network.

Sky-WAN Security enables organization to stop hackers and malicious actors in their tracks with next generation firewall, unified threat management, intrusion detection and protection, anti-virus, secure VPN, and more all directly built into the flagship SASE offering.

Sky-WAN enhances the SASE platform by offering next-generation firewall (NGFW), secure remote access, and unified threat management (UTM) services that protects application and user activity across the enterprise WAN, branch, and private or public clouds. Organizations can finally secure their enterprise-wide networking while increasing multi-cloud application performance and dramatically driving down costs.

Sky-WAN Security increases protection for your on-premises, branch, or cloud applications and simplifies the interoperability of security and networking. Built inside of Sky-WAN SASE, Sky-WAN Security delivers a full suite of network security capabilities that are all centrally managed through a single pane of glass: allowing you to get visibility and enforce policies in real-time.

While the branch office has become an increasing area of cyber security risk over the last several years, many enterprises are not able to budget or support the needed security infrastructure. Add in the proliferation of managing branch sites, cloud applications, mobile and remote workers, unmanaged devices, organizations are facing an ever-growing attack surface.

Deploying advanced security in networks is often a challenge as well with organizations lacking sufficient IT personnel and skillset making the integration of 3rd party security products difficult and costly. Enterprise IT and security teams have the opportunity to both increase network security and simplify operations by migrating from proprietary security appliances to a software-defined approach that is directly embedded into your network: making security deployment and integration a non-issue.

Sky-WAN Security embedded into our flagship product, Sky-WAN SASE, gives organizations critical capabilities such as multi-tenancy, multi-service, elasticity and zero-touch provisioning. Multi-service capabilities and service chaining ensure that organizations can include critical security functions like next-generation firewall and secure web gateway that is easily integrated into their existing network infrastructure.

Sky-WAN has created broad set of virtualized security functions that run on commodity x86-based hardware, and that are open and fully programmable. Providers can create basic managed firewall services or rich multi-function services like unified threat management (UTM) that replace complex physical or virtual appliances. These services can operate on-premises, in the provider data center or cloud, public cloud or a combination of all. All of the security functionality is embedded directly into the network stacking: making Sky-WAN more cost effective than 3rd party or proprietary security hardware or software packages.

As you rearchitect your network to enable SD-WAN, you need consistent security across branches, clouds, and users.
Thin, rich, or full-stack routers embed simple or flexible SD-WAN and security functions to meet IT service, security, and compliance demands onsite.

Access and connectivity is secured over the public Internet with threat protection over all ports and performance assurance for multi-cloud apps
Get efficient authentication, strong encryption, and micro segmentation delivered through trustworthy systems and end-to-end threat protection.
Simplify threat prevention with the shortest time to threat detection.

IT and security agility increase with zero-touch provisioning that enables deployment of a multi-function Sky-WAN security solution within hours. Compare this deployment time with 3rd party security solutions that require weeks or months required to install and integrate multiple proprietary security appliances.

Sky-WAN Security uses built-in service chaining to easily integrate with existing security software and appliances. Ongoing operations are simplified through the Sky-WAN Director management platform, which provides a single console and set of policies across all Sky-WAN security functions. Capacity increases are dynamically provisioned through Sky-WAN Director, as are new security functions.

Sky-WAN enables IT and security teams to design new branch security architectures at significantly lower capital costs. Rather than using proprietary hardware appliances, Sky-WAN is deployed on low-cost commodity appliances.

Operational costs are reduced through central management and zero-touch provisioning, which eliminate deployment truck rolls and greatly simplify ongoing operations such as software updates and capacity expansion.

SkyWire’s optional add-on security suite delivered via cloud or on the SD-WAN appliance provides Unified Threat Management (UTM) with capabilities such as intrusion prevention, reputation based threat mitigation, advanced persistent threat blocking, data loss prevention, network mapping, application control, web content filtering, antivirus, anti-spam and intelligent antivirus.

Sky-WAN Analytics is purpose-built for Sky-WAN Secure Cloud IP Platform for use-case focused analytics covering SD-Routing, SD-WAN, SD-Security, and SDBranch. It is a rich near real-time big data solution that provides visibility and control, base-lining, correlation, prediction and feedback loop into Versa software solutions. It provides near real-time and historical search, reports on usage patterns, trends, security events, and alerts.

Sky-WAN Analytics analyzes large amounts of data sent from FlexVNFs to present critical data points as actionable analytics and reports. Tight native integration with Sky-WAN FlexVNF ensures optimized storage, search and performance.

Sky-WAN Analytics has built-in multi-tenancy that enables a single cluster to provide service for hundreds of customers, enabling deployment flexibility and economy of scale. It tightly integrates with Sky-WAN Director for complete role- based access control. It is operations-ready and supports standard protocols and log formats, such as Syslog and IPFIX, making it compatible with existing SIEM, monitoring, and reporting systems.

Sky-WAN Analytics is extensible and flexible via REST APIs. The comprehensive and native capabilities reduce costs and simplifies deployments and data analysis by reducing the dependency on various 3rd party data analytics platforms. For multi-vendor environments, Sky-WAN Analytics interoperates with well-known performance management applications and 3rd party services.

The result is carrier-grade, multi-tenant big data analysis and visibility for realizing the full value proposition of Sky-WAN software-defined solutions.

As your business adjusts to the new ”normal”, remote employees rely on bandwidth-intensive business applications, such as video conferencing, cloud ERP systems, Office 365 and VoIP, to stay connected. Relying on multiple mission critical applications increases the need to prioritise network traffic on the home network.

This can be easily achieved with group policies using SD-WAN. Instead of deploying best-effort VPN’s for your WFH employees, SD-WAN can provide a business class home networking experience, with security levels, scheduled employee monitoring and application prioritisation – exactly like at the office, remotely!