Fortinet - Work from anywhere with SD-WAN
July 9, 2021
Justine Ceppok
Fortinet fortigate
Fortinet fortigate
If the last year has taught us one thing, it is the need for workplace flexibility. Corporate IT teams around the world suddenly faced a global pandemic and needed to transform processes and business models as quickly as possible with an SD-WAN solution. In many cases, setting up dozens, hundreds or even thousands of employee workstations to work from home had to happen virtually overnight. Many companies planned for the fact that only a certain, small percentage of employees would use a VPN for remote access, but when the pandemic hit, the IT department had to cope with updating and adding for a significant number of additional VPN connections.
Even in those companies that have returned to majority face-to-face working, there will likely be some employees who will continue to work remotely. According to a Pew Research survey, about half of busy respondents want to work remotely at least part-time. And analysts at Global Workplace Analytics predict that by the end of 2021, about 25-30% of the workforce will work at home several days a week.
SD-WAN offers flexibility for a "Work From Anywhere" world
To meet the demands of employees, organisations need to adopt a 'Work from Anywhere' approach to their networks and security. It is no longer a choice between the best option for a largely remote workforce and the best option for a primarily office-based workforce. Companies need solutions that can adapt to any type of hybrid working model and cover all working scenarios flexibly and securely.
Some companies have used the challenges of the pandemic as an opportunity to invest in innovation, including advanced technologies like SD-WAN. Now they are using SD-WAN not only to support traditional branch offices, but also to enable the home office as the new 'branch of one'.
SD-WAN for multi-cloud deployments
SD-WAN is key for organisations that need to connect to multiple clouds to accelerate the delivery of cloud-based resources, whether the resources are deployed in a private or public cloud environment, or whether users need access to business-critical software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365 or streaming video. Providing reliable access to cloud-based resources requires granular control, including dynamic failover, SLA-based application control and application availability, even during brownouts or power outages.
Solutions should support secure, high-performance connectivity between public cloud workloads running on multiple clouds without increasing cost and complexity. Fast, encrypted connections over the internet reduce operational costs and provide a better application experience for users.
The problem is that the internet was not designed for performance. Most traditional methods of directing traffic through public networks do not reroute traffic to avoid congestion. To solve this problem, organisations need cloud-on-ramp solutions that can connect colocation sites with a cloud-based application accelerator to speed up cloud connectivity. At the same time, focus on optimising the middle mile by using sensors embedded in backbone networks. Combining SD-WAN acceleration with backbone-based route optimisation and protocol acceleration helps reduce the inherent performance issues associated with traditional internet routing.
Another challenge associated with SD-WAN is that most solutions need to connect to a vendor-specific cloud connector that manages things like traffic control and internet access before connecting to an application acceleration point. This element adds additional paths and delays to a system that already reacts unfavourably to latency, jitter and packet loss. Enterprises should use an SD-WAN solution that has an integrated connector to enable intelligent connectivity flexibility without having to route application traffic back through an SD-WAN vendor's remote cloud connector.
Security-aware networking with SD-WAN
The key to making the right investments is to look at security and networking as a converged solution, rather than as separate elements. A secure SD-WAN solution should be ubiquitous and able to be deployed beyond the branch office to the home, campus and multi-cloud environments. As users work from anywhere, a flexible, secure SD-WAN solution is critical to provide security with a good user experience everywhere.
A secure SD-WAN along with cloud-based security solutions can enable secure WAN edge, thin WAN edge and endpoint-based ZTNA solutions. To improve the user experience with a better security posture, organisations should set up an infrastructure that covers all three deployments to leverage the same orchestrator and predictive analytics based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Covering these three deployments supports all the use cases required for a hybrid workforce where some employees work in the office and some work at home.
SD-WAN offers flexibility for a hybrid workforce
When looking for solutions, organisations need to be mindful that adaptability is part of the equation as circumstances and plans change. A solution provider should be able to support the business whether you plan to bring all employees back to the office, continue work-from-home policies, or any combination in between. Solutions need to be able to support any kind of hybrid work-from-anywhere model. And most importantly, they must be able to do so in a secure manner.
Use a security-led networking approach to improve the user experience and simplify operations at the WAN edge with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN.