Eagle-Lanner tech blog

 

There is no doubt that SD-WAN has become one of the most prevailing technologies for IT fields due to the advantages of end-to-end visibility, agility, application optimization, and particularly the economical incentives that allows a white-box VCPE hardware to run third-party applications and VNFs (virtualized network functions). Indeed, SD-WAN shares the bandwidth of traditional MPLS connectivity and public Internet so that connectivity between branch offices and headquarter can be far more cost-effective. However, the use of public Internet indicates higher exposure to potential cyber-threats. With the widespread of SD-WAN in the enterprise sector, it is essential to secure the software-defined wide area network before an evolved attack begins to penetrate.

Today enterprises are allocating more and more resources in edge computing to accelerate the deployments of mobile applications and services, while boosting performance in user experience. As the era of IoT and IIoT is around the corner, edge computing can be observed in various environments, such as retail, factory floor, campus, public services, telecom stations, utility plants and transportations.

The year of 2020 marks a significant and exciting year for networking and communication. First, 2020 is the year for the announced launch of 5G network, and all the technological hypes associated with 5G, such as IoT (Internet of Things), VR/AR, autonomous vehicles, collaborative robots, smart homes, artificial intelligence, Block Chain and full industrial automation. Indeed, the industry is anticipating the realization of these exciting and beneficial use cases.

The term Secure Access Service Edge, short for SASE, was first showed in an analysis by Gartner in 2019. In concept, SASE is the simplified architecture which converges SD-WAN with network security, and delivers applications and services from cloud to edge. The rise of SASE is mainly contributed by the continuous momentum of edge, cloud-native and mobile computing. In the digitalized business world today, data is largely generated at the network edge and cloud, and thus applications have to be deployed where data is generated to minimize the latency and boost performance.

SD-WAN has been one of the most commonly deployed networking technology for the past couple years, and because of its technological and economical benefits, enterprises of all sizes and scales have broadened their use cases for SD-WAN. Today, it has evolved to meet a diverse vertical for wider application span.

Airtight security is nonnegotiable when it comes to adopting IoT technology for mission-critical applications in all Industry 4.0 scenarios. Intelligent manufacturing, for instance, can be protected against network manipulation, attacks and data theft but only if its product line machines and devices are correctly identified and properly secured; and such security requires hardware appliances equipped with seamlessly integrated security chipsets capable of silently safeguarding communications between all devices and machines within heavily networked infrastructures.

The wide adoption of cloud computing in both public and private sectors has changed the communications and interactions between organizations and their uses or customers. This paradigm shift has in fact continued to drive enterprises to improve their network service performance in order to meet the expectations of the public. However, the increased market competition has also changed the way organizations upgrade their IT infrastructures.

Page 17 of 31