In our SD-WAN FAQ video series, we answer the most frequently asked questions about SD-WAN adoption.

The fourth video in the series sees Mark Hall, Daisy Corporate Services’ connectivity expert, explain whether there are any security implications for SD-WAN.

Question 4 | Are there any security implications for SD-WAN?

As soon as you start putting your network traffic out onto the internet, security shoots straight to the top of the list of things that you should be considering. A typical software-defined WAN design involves creating a network using encrypted VPN tunnels with stateful packet inspection so you can be confident that your site-to-site traffic is secure.

The other thing that you should be considering is your perimeter security design. One thing that SD-WAN is great for is managing split tunnelling of traffic with internet traffic breaking out locally. Traditional MPLS has a central internet breakout making it really easy to deploy and manage a pair of perimeter firewalls. However, moving that internet breakout to the edge sites means more internet gateways, more attack points and therefore more firewalls that you need to manage.

Fortunately, the best SD-WAN devices on the market are also leading firewalls within their own right, so you can build and manage configuration and updates through a single cloud platform. This means that it’s really easy to manage your perimeter security across a large number of sites.

Daisy works with Cisco to provide Meraki SD-WAN as a fully-managed service. Cisco is a leader in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.