Software-Defined Networking in a Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), is a new approach to support branch office connectivity in a simplified and cost-effective manner. It is the ability to use multiple ISP egress links to provide continuity across a specific path, whether that’s an SD-WAN that you define internal to your own perimeter network, or what you're also connecting to internet resources – like SalesForce, PeopleSoft, Cloud, and SaaS applications.
Gartner predicted all the way back in 2015 that by 2019 30% of all enterprises would have deployed SD-WAN in their branches. This is because instead of installing traditional specialized WAN technology that includes expensive hardware and software, SD-WAN provides the flexibility to utilize less expensive and commercially available internet access with the same if not better security and reliability.
In a nutshell, traditional enterprise WAN architectures have proven to be suboptiminal, both from a price and performance perspective. SD-WAN not only provides the flexibility to utilize less expensive connectivity, but it can also provide the same, if not better security and reliability.
With dozens of companies taking advantage of SD-WAN’s cost and flexibility, Barracuda Networks provides a real edge in the industry - namely through their top-notch security features, multiple simultaneous link usage, and central management:
SECURITY
Founded in 2003, Barracuda has been in the security industry for over a decade and has meshed SD-WAN connectivity with its advanced security into a single integrated product that can be deployed on-premises as a physical or virtual appliance or in the cloud, making it ideal for mission critical applications.
What makes Barracuda stand out from an advanced security standpoint is their global threat intelligence infrastructure. This powerful framework combines threat data collection from multiple sources and forms the backbone of Barracuda security solutions, intelligently leveraging on-premises, cloud, and end-point technologies to deliver advanced threat protection that has been developed through laborious research and analysis of immense threat data sets.
MULTIPLE SIMULTANEOUS LINK USAGE
Businesses often need the ability to use multiple links with SD-WAN facing scenarios such as an MPLS network and their DSL on it. They may need to use them in an active backup fashion. With other vendors you can’t use them actively or simultaneously. They can't do things like link balancing between the two.
Barracuda has had this technology for over a decade. The ability to simultaneously use both links in a failover and failback scenario are invaluable. For example, if the primary internet circuit goes down, all the traffic fails over to the backup DSL line. The primary connection comes back online, all new sessions will be reevaluated, and if those sessions can be sent out to the primary circuit without breaking traffic, it will failback automatically. There is the ability to seamlessly use multiple transports to either utilize and enhance MPLS or get rid of MPLS altogether and use cheaper commodity lines.
CENTRAL MANAGEMENT
NextGen Control Center is Barracuda's backbone for firewall management. It gives users full features such as copy, move, and paste - exactly like moving information around a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet. No one else has this technology built into their SD-WAN.
It offers role-based administration, very granular access controls, network segmentation, management path versus data path type of execution for administration and for combining segmentation between customers, multi-tendency is all built in by default.
These things make Barracuda stand out from the competition, along with their long-standing history of reliability, dependability and affordability. It is no surprise that they are making a big splash in the SD-WAN field.
Learn more about Barracuda's SD-Wan solution in the video below and if your interested in trying Barracuda's SD-WAN solution for yourself, contact us to request a free trial.
