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Branch offices are back baby! In this post-pandemic era, businesses are opening their doors to employees wanting to return to their branches. However, hybrid work persists, with 62% of employees continuing to work remotely. This new normal comes with many unknowns. One of the raising concerns is how organizations can continue to secure access and deliver an exceptional end-user experience regardless of where their employees are located. As a result, businesses are increasingly adopting a secure access service edge (SASE) that converges security and networking capabilities into a cloud-delivered solution to enable the hybrid workforce. Unfortunately, the poor alignment and lack of collaboration within the network and security organizations create significant challenges in implementing a secure and better-performing network. They often deploy separate solutions for SD-WAN and security that deliver a suboptimal SASE framework, resulting in increased security risks, network downtime, and added costs. Gartner® recognizes the shift to a single vendor SASE solution by stating, “Through 2024, more than 60% of organizations will opt for a dual-vendor approach to their SASE initiatives, down from more than 80% in early 2022”[1].
To overcome the challenges with a multi-vendor SASE solution, Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE converges best-of-breed SD-WAN and security into a single offering purpose-built for agile, cloud-enabled organizations.
Learn more about enabling hybrid work at our on-demand Prisma SASE event.
SD-WAN Deployments Require Cloud Security for Today’s Workforce
SD-WAN solutions have facilitated MPLS replacement and cloud connectivity to improve application performance and business agility. At the same time, the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud-based security solutions for operational simplicity and cost reduction. With employees returning to branches, businesses are focused on converging SD-WAN solutions with cloud-based security services for integrated SASE services. Gartner® states, “By 2024, 80% of SD-WAN deployments will incorporate security service edge (SSE) requirements, up from less than 25% in 2022”. However, businesses with legacy SD-WAN solutions continue to simply add security as a bolt-on service resulting in significant security gaps and poor performance. To seamlessly migrate to a SASE framework, businesses need to adopt a fully converged solution instead of evaluating multiple solutions and qualify them for tighter integration.
Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN is the industry’s only next-generation SD-WAN solution that is autonomous, integrated, and secure. It natively integrates with Prisma Access and delivers best-in-class security on a global scale.
Prisma SD-WAN Can Jump Start Your Journey to SASE
SD-WAN solutions have depended on cloud gateways and internet backbones to deliver services like security, cloud and SaaS connectivity. They constantly struggle with overheads of managing these points of presence (POPs) and ensuring they are strategically located to secure and optimize application performance effectively. Prisma SD-WAN’s native integration with Prisma Access leverages its global presence across 70+ geographic locations at scale to deliver 99.9% of uptime, the lowest latency for applications, and the industry’s only SaaS SLAs.
Most SD-WAN solutions manually create a single tunnel to multiple security services to deliver features like secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB) and Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) that add to operational complexity and costs. Moreover, this model fails to provide any SD-WAN solution's redundancy and failover key. Prisma SD-WAN supports active-active and active-standby connectivity to Prisma Access that ensures the application resiliency till the last mile. Additionally, overcoming the shortcomings of legacy approaches, only Prisma Access consolidates best-of-breed capabilities, such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) 2.0, SWG, NG-CASB, FWaaS, data loss prevention (DLP), and more, into a cloud-native global services edge, thus simplifying management and providing better security posture.
Legacy SD-WAN solutions cannot automate or accurately select cloud gateway/POPs based on application and network SLAs that lead to suboptimal performance and potential outages. Prisma SD-WAN extends its industry-leading analytics capabilities to Prisma Access, providing end-to-end visibility into application, network performance, and SLAs that ensure the best end-user experience for all applications.
Finally, Prisma SD-WAN is the industry’s first SD-WAN solution to offer a flexible bandwidth-on-demand model that allows organizations to seamlessly allocate bandwidth across branch offices from an aggregated pool. For organizations building a SASE architecture, the Prisma SD-WAN consumption model is an extension of the Prisma Access bandwidth add-on consumption model, which can secure and deliver an improved user experience.
Single-Vendor SASE solution
Organizations are looking to modernize and consolidate their networking and security infrastructures into a single service to simplify management and operations to provide the least privilege access to their hybrid workforces. Prisma SD-WAN enables customers to plan and migrate to their SASE initiatives with a single-vendor solution that delivers exceptional user experience and secure access anywhere.
Watch our ZTNA 2.0 on-demand event to learn directly from industry experts as they share evolving market challenges, strategic best practices and the latest innovations from Prisma SASE.
- Gartner, How to Align SD-WAN Projects With SASE Initiatives, Bjarne Munch, Lisa Pierce, Craig Lawson, 18 April 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.