SD-WAN and SASE

SDWAN is a now "must have" not a "nice to have" and is the critical element to a bulletproof, outage-proof solution. But many businesses are still uncertain of what SDWAN actually does. Simply put, it’s an appliance that sits at your site(s) and a cloud service that work together (please note SDWAN IS NOT just a firewall appliance with multiple WAN ports!!!). SDWAN stands between your LAN and two or more internet connections. Plug it all in, and what you have is a solution that understands all the packets flowing through it and which packets need the fastest and best route (e.g. voice packets need the best route, not necessarily the fastest). SDWAN makes a decision on which ISP to use in real-time using the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and other information on each connection. MOS is the de facto standard measurement(s) for bandwidth integrity and is the accumulated score of latency, jitter, delay, packet loss etc. If MOS is poor on one of the connections, the SDWAN seamlessly moves traffic over to the next best connection which is used until the traffic jam clears up. Most real SDWAN solutions will constantly and continuously use all of the connections when MOS is high and even aggregate the multiple connections into one larger connection. So instead of your firewall or router thinking you have two 100Mbps connections, a real SDWAN solution will actually give you one 200Mbps connection! All of this is done moment by moment, packet by packet, in real-time. This type of "traffic-management" is especially useful in many of today's sensitive applications such as VoIP, video, critical cloud services, and hypersensitive VPN connections. Businesses with multiple locations and SDWAN at each one get a built-in, site-to-site private network, eliminating the need for expensive MPLS and Point-to-Point connections.