Industry Solutions

Education:

Secure SD-WAN for Educational Institutions

Digital transformation presents endless possibilities for educational institutions to evolve and meet the demands of today’s administrators, educators, and students. The technology-enabled learning environment is giving rise to a new school of thought that helps educational institutions move beyond the ambit of conventional classroom and campus environment.

• Remote learning requires cloud-hosted learning and assessment platforms, collaboration tools, smart pods, interactive displays, and immersive audio systems.
• Current technological demands require simplicity, speed, and convenience of smart devices over physical textbooks and learning resources. Speed and performance of collaboration tools are driving current staff and student requirements.
• Sprawl of campuses require institutions to not only supply fast communication to all sites but secure the data that is there. With remote learning, it is even more critical to secure the data between all the different departments and sites.

Challenges with the Modern Campus

While new digital initiatives have brought about exciting growth opportunities for educational institutions, lack of a supporting network infrastructure is impacting efficiency and operational costs.

WAN network is the backbone anchoring all units of the digital learning ecosystem—smart classrooms, online learning, and collaborative platforms, regular campus operations, and more. Supporting this complex digital environment requires a secure, scalable, agile, and high-performing network infrastructure. On the contrary, legacy WAN inefficiencies are growing by the day, unable to keep up with changing demands, creating huge performance and security bottlenecks.

Run primarily on bandwidth-limited, expensive MPLS private circuits, legacy WAN networks are falling short of meeting the needs of bandwidth-hungry audio/video, social networking, and more.

Campus network users, parents and faculty, with smartphones, laptops, and tablets, have dramatically increased traffic influx, eating into network bandwidth. As more applications are deployed, and new cloud applications are adopted, the hub-and-spoke architecture with data center backhauling is delaying application access, slowing down performance, and leaving users frustrated.

With remote access and extensive cloud usage, the risk of cyberattacks is also increasing, and legacy WAN networks with siloed security systems are incapable of securing valuable academic assets and resources hosted on the cloud.

How Secure SD-WAN Provides Speed and Performance

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can help keep up with technology-enabled, new-age learning models, educational institutions are now turning to Secure SD-WAN. The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Secure SD-WAN makes applications run faster, safer, and more reliably. It delivers consistent and highest quality of experience for all application users irrespective of their location. Secure SD-WAN offers educational institutions the freedom to adopt the application delivery infrastructure that best fits them, without sacrificing performance, security, reliability, or control.

Engineering & Construction:

Secure SD-WAN for Energy and Utility Companies

Energy and utility companies, typically including electricity, natural gas, and public services, are highly distributed in nature, with branch offices and remote sites widely spread out across distant geographies. The remote sites are connected by multiple networks leased from different network service providers. These networks are complex and heterogenous, made up of disparate purpose-built hardware for every networking and security function. As a result, centrally managing and maintaining all the sites is labor-intensive and highly time-consuming.

To survive market volatilities, aggressive profit margins, and ever-evolving government regulations, energy and utility companies are swiftly adding digital capabilities such as cloud, IoT, and other new operational technologies. In doing so, they can converge siloed IT (Information) and OT (Operational) networks, which enables them with better control over all branch offices and remote sites, considerably improving efficiency and profitability.

Preventing Outages and Delays

Going digital is a smart choice; however, if not supported by a resilient, secure, and cost-efficient WAN network, it can create more problems than solutions.

Legacy WAN networks running on MPLS are failing to offer reliable cloud access, responsive connectivity, and cost-effective bandwidth. Employees at branch offices trying to access mission-critical ERP and Office 365 applications are often met with delayed access, slow application performance. Using converged voice and data applications to communicate internally and with customers and suppliers involves long and tedious traffic backhauling leading to frequent outages and considerable service delays.

Given the complexity of global WAN networks that leverage multiple vendor services, securing all endpoints is a challenge. Adopting cloud and IoT technologies has further created more network vulnerabilities and security gaps, making the energy and utility sector a lucrative target for cybercriminals.

Time and again, major corporations have been hit by dangerous APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats), ransomware, and malware attacks. The repercussions of a security breach are severe—deep financial loss, business disruption, impact to everyday public services, and regulatory penalties.

Further, the legacy WAN’s hardware-centric architecture makes network management and new branch deployment an endless struggle, taking as long as three to six months, awfully slowing down time-to-market.

Lighting Up Cost Efficiency and Performance with Secure SD-WAN

Energy and utility companies running on tight budgets cannot afford to modernize their legacy infrastructures with a “rip and replace” model.

Nonetheless, they can resolve networking issues cost-effectively and increase operational efficiency significantly with a Secure SD-WAN solution. Secure SD-WAN is a powerful enabler of digital transformation. It can help energy and utility companies seamlessly adopt new technologies to deliver a consistent and seamless quality of experience across all branch locations.

Financial Services:

Secure SD-WAN for Financial Services

In the digital-first era, customers seek fast and 24/7 access to financial services, whether it is to make deposits, avail loans, claim insurance, make investments, or check balances. To win over these tech-savvy customers, financial services organizations such as banks, credit unions, insurance, and mortgage companies, over the years, have constantly continued to innovate digitally capabilities in ways to help attract customers.

To build brand credibility and a broad customer base often nurtured by human interactions, financial services companies are expanding their network of physical branch offices remote areas to offer more availability to customers without sacrificing performance.

Protecting Transactions Without Sacrificing Speed

To make applications and data readily accessible for employees across all branches, financial services companies are rapidly moving their workloads to the cloud.

However, extensive cloud usage and increased digital interactions have skyrocketed bandwidth consumption, heavily straining the WAN networks. Legacy WAN networks running on MPLS lines, backhauling traffic to the data center are failing to meet these increased demands, leading to frequent network outages and dipping application performance. Employees and customers trying to access mission-critical applications from HQ data centers, cloud-hosted, and SaaS-delivered sites are forced to deal with delayed access and painfully slow financial transactions.

To operate and secure WAN networks, the financial services companies typically invest in multiple networking and security hardware devices. But this practice has only led to fragmented security, make the whole network more convoluted for companies to effectively manage, monitor, and support new services and new branch deployments. Regulation compliance is yet another challenge—manually configuring and updating disparate security devices to abide by stringent data privacy regulations such as EU’s GDPR and USA’s CCPA and FINRA are a laborious and time-intensive task.

How Secure SD-WAN Enables Transformation

To rise above networking issues, financial services companies are looking for modern networking solutions that offer resilience to readily support changing bandwidth and performance demands, agility to easily deploy and manage new branches while keeping sensitive financial information secure and confidential.

Secure SD-WAN does all this and more. The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure should not be necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Healthcare:

Secure SD-WAN for Healthcare

New-age technological advancements are providing the healthcare sector with new and innovative ways of managing and delivering patient services while improving profitability. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that organizations protect patient data and implementing a Secure SD-WAN solution can help simplify adherence to compliance requirements. In a new age of protecting and delivering top healthcare, healthcare organizations need to allow digitally transform their traditional systems and tools:

• Cloud is enabling hospitals with easy storage and constant access to electronic health records (EHRs) irrespective of where the care providers and patients are located.
• Hospitals are increasingly adopting VDIs or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to quickly and securely access patient records on their mobile devices.
• Telehealth facility allows healthcare providers to provide medical consultations to their patients virtually over video conferencing. In doing so, hospitals can cut down in-person visit costs, as well as deliver quality services to patients located in remote, rural regions.
• Promising technologies such as IoT, AI, and Big Data analytics are driving unique and remarkable opportunities for the healthcare sector. Adopting these new technologies has helped health care providers streamline operations, collect patient preferences and market trends information, facilitate predictive and preventive care, remotely monitor patient vitals using wearables, and carry out complicated medical procedures and clinical trials comfortably and efficiently.

Eliminating Outages and Inefficiences for Healthcare Providers

Technological innovations have immensely helped the healthcare sector in building a patient-centric service model that meets modern-day customer expectations. However, keeping this complex digital-driven ecosystem up and running efficiently and cost-effectively has been an endless struggle.

WAN network is the backbone anchoring all units of healthcare—medical staff, equipment, hospital branches, VDIs, and patients. Supporting this complex and large ecosystem requires a secure, scalable, agile, and high-performing network infrastructure. On the contrary, legacy WAN inefficiencies are growing by the day, unable to keep up with changing demands, creating huge bottlenecks in service delivery.

• VDIs often use bandwidth-intensive cloud applications to access patient records and medical images. Legacy WAN running primarily on expensive MPLS has limited bandwidth capacity and is failing to meet the increased bandwidth demands. Investing in more MPLS to make up for the bandwidth deficiency is becoming unaffordable.
• Telehealth leverages real-time applications such as voice and video for medical consultations. Frequent network outages in the legacy WAN is leading to dropped calls, choppy audio, and jitter-ridden video disrupting the user experience.
• The healthcare sector is heavily governed by data privacy and payment security regulations, such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS. Legacy WAN, with multiple devices and interfaces, all working in silos, with little visibility into the network, has made compliance management a complex and arduous task taking months to handle software upgrades across all branches after internal validation.
• Mergers and acquisitions are an inherent part of the growth and survival strategy for the healthcare sector. Setting up or integrating new branches with a legacy WAN network is a nightmare, taking as long as three months, slowing down time-to-market.

Besides the legacy WAN problems, healthcare providers continue to battle management expectations to cut down costs, improve operational efficiency, meet patient demands, and maintain rigorous regulatory compliance.

Providing the Best Level of Secure SD-WAN Care

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can help resolve operational inefficiencies and catalyze digital growth, the healthcare sector is now turning to Secure SD-WAN.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Hospitality:

Secure SD-WAN for Hospitality

Hotels, convention facilities, food, and travel services that cater to the needs of businesses and individuals have been rapidly deploying new services and applications over the Internet. The goal is to provide more convenient registration, travel arrangements, high-speed network access to guests, seamless service purchases, and improve other aspects of their business operations.

Customer Service Depends on Reliable Connectivity

While technological innovations have brought about extraordinary cost and efficiency benefits, they are also introducing significant management, performance, and security challenges.

What is the most important business driver for a multi-chain restaurant? Food? The answer is not even about the food or ambiance. The most important element is the connectivity. What if, in today’s ultra-connected world, a multi-site restaurant could not last 15 minutes without connectivity? When the network goes down, business stops, plain and simple.

The entire restaurant and hospitality operations is dependent on connectivity. Without connectivity, it becomes very difficult for the employees to process transactions and move customers out of the door, for servers to communicate with the kitchen staff. All the organizations nowadays process orders digitally, and if the network is down, the team must resort to the paper-based ordering system and process. Also, when the connectivity is lost, organizations will have to resort to accepting payments without credit card authorization, which is risky, or accept cash, which is bad for the business, or call to authorize each card transaction, which is time-consuming.

In a survey of more than 2,000 Americans, U.S. Bank found that people aren’t carrying a lot of cash with them, and, when they do, they aren’t spending much. Overall, 50 percent of respondents said they carry cash with them less than half of the time they are out. When they do carry it, 76 percent say they keep less than $50 on hand, and nearly half say they keep less than $20.

About 46 percent say they use cashless than eight days each month, and 5 percent say they never use it.

Hospitality companies realize the many benefits of using the internet to streamline services, share information and communicate with their customers. Users of these online services must have immediate access, as slow and erratic performance or inability to quickly access information, such as hotel room availability and airline flight times can cause customers to go to a competitor.

Employees accessing applications from HQ data centers and cloud-hosted and SaaS-delivered sites need the applications to be fast, reliable, and secure. IT needs the WAN to be agile, for easy deployment and management, and to have visibility to respond to dynamic network changes.

Offering the White Glove Service with Secure SD-WAN

IT teams of many multi-chain restaurants, SPA, and hotels are now pursuing Secure SD-WAN to take a stand against network failures. As hospitality organizations embark on digital transformation to create better experiences for guests, partners and drive better business outcomes, a Secure SD-WAN will enable them to connect, secure, and optimize the delivery of applications and data in an era when the majority of workloads exist outside the data center.

With Secure SD-WAN, hospitality organizations can create an end-to-end software-based network architecture that delivers services to applications and data wherever they are located on a global scale with consistent, pervasive connectivity, and security.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. A Secure SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Legal:

Secure SD-WAN for Legal Firms

Privacy laws and protection of client and IP data is mission critical for legal forms. With digital transformation paving the way for new opportunities and amplified efficiency to protect sensitive data, the legal sector is leaning in, making new technology adoption a key priority. An increasing number of law firms are adopting new-age work models to synergize their branch offices and deliver a frictionless and secure end-user experience to their employees and clients. Legal firms are now adopting new methods to strengthen their services by:

• Migrating data and applications to the cloud which has helped with easy storage and instant access to client data irrespective of where the users are located
• Leveraging VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is helping office staff quickly and securely access sensitive client records on their mobile devices
• Utilizing video conferencing is helping connect with partners and clients across the world
• Implmenting new collaboration tools are helping streamline everyday operations such as case management, client meetings, effort and expense tracking, resources training, document sharing, and more

Moving to a New Way of Legal Practice

While these technological innovations are helping legal firms outgrow legacy work practices and meet modern-day, tech-savvy consumer expectations, integrating and running them efficiently and cost-effectively with a legacy WAN network continues to be a significant challenge.

• Real-time applications such as Video and VoIP used for virtual consultations are bandwidth-heavy. Legacy WAN running primarily on expensive, bandwidth-limited MPLS lines is unable to support the demands of increased traffic, leading to frequent network outages. This has resulted in dropped calls, choppy audio, and jitter-ridden video, impacting client experience.
• Cloud has undoubtedly helped law firms build business scalability and efficiency, but security continues to be a huge concern. Law firms deal with highly sensitive information such as client statements, sensitive IP, and case evidence that need robust protection. With static data center security and complex hardware systems, legacy WAN is incapable of delivering the kind of security required for cloud platforms. In addition, with remote working becoming the new normal, cyberattacks are only going to spike up.
• Legal firms are also bound by data privacy regulations such as EU’s GDPR and USA’s CCPA acts. A legacy WAN network with complex architecture, multiple interfaces, and poor visibility makes adherence to these mandates across all branches a laborious and time-consuming task.
• Datacenter backhauling for security reasons slows down application performance, further delaying overall operations and productivity, incurring added costs.
• Mergers and acquisitions are an inherent part of the for a law firms’ growth and survival strategy. Setting up or integrating new branches with a legacy WAN network is a nightmare, taking as long as three months, slowing down time-to-market.

Protecting Attorney-Client Data with Secure SD-WAN

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can constantly support increased traffic influx, improve real-time interactions, secure cloud connectivity, reduce operational costs, and catalyze digital growth, the legal sector is now turning to Secure SD-WAN.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Manufacturing:

Secure SD-WAN for Manufacturing

The manufacturing sector today is fiercely driven by the aspirations of Industry 4.0 and ‘Smart Factories’, where traditional manufacturing practices and modern digital technologies come together to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and reduce overhead costs.

Advanced technologies such as IoT, machine learning, robotics, predictive analytics, automation, 3D printing, and cloud are enabling manufacturers with greater visibility, critical insights, and better control over the supply chain processes to adapt and thrive in a highly volatile, competitive market.

Remote Collaboration and Branch Site Challenges

Manufacturing facilities are geographically spread out, often separated from their corporate offices and data centers. Providing critical application access across these facilities has always been a challenge with applications hosted in data centers. Transitioning to the cloud has helped overcome this challenge by making applications and data easily accessible to employees irrespective of where they are located.

The cost-efficiency and scalability benefits of cloud are showing the way out for conventional data center-focused architectures with manufacturers migrating most applications today, including productivity, ERP, CADD, and back-office applications from on-premises to the cloud.

Smart Factories' are essentially designed with a powerful network of IoT devices, cameras, and sensors for real-time information sharing between inventory managers, operators, field workers, suppliers, contractors, and partners. Real-time granular level monitoring of machine health and performance helps employees make faster, informed decisions to achieve higher product quality, optimize energy consumption, and better predict machine maintenance.

Lastly, industrial robots are helping manufacturers do mammoth and risky warehouse and shipping tasks easily and efficiently, eliminating the need for human intervention. 3D printing or additive manufacturing with rapid prototyping capability is helping manufacturers overcome complex design challenges and achieve shorter lead times.

Manufacturers Need to Move Away from Legacy WAN

Digital transformation has been a game-changer for the ever-expanding, ever-growing manufacturing sector. However, the next-gen technologies require next-generation networks that are agile, cost-effective, and secure to adapt and fulfill the changing demands.

Run primarily on bandwidth-limited, expensive MPLS private circuits, legacy WAN networks are falling short of meeting the needs of bandwidth-hungry applications. As more applications are deployed, and new cloud platforms are adopted, the hub-and-spoke architecture with data center backhauling is delaying application access, slowing down performance, and affecting user productivity.

With increased remote access and extensive cloud usage, the risk of cyberattacks is also growing, and legacy WAN network with siloed security systems is incapable of securing design assets and resources hosted on the cloud. Further, the complexity of legacy WAN’s hardware-centric architecture makes network management and new branch deployment an endless struggle, taking as long as three to six months, awfully slowing down time-to-market.

While network quality varies from one location to another, operations in remote or rural areas present the greatest challenge. With manufacturing processes dependent on critical ERP systems, manufacturers can’t afford a slow or unreliable WAN, that leads to downtime, and inevitably, loss of user productivity and revenue.

Reduce Complexity and Costs with Secure SD-WAN

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can constantly support increased traffic volume, improve real-time monitoring, secure cloud connectivity, reduce operational costs, and catalyze digital growth, manufacturers are now turning to Secure SD-WAN.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Public Sector:

Secure SD-WAN for Public Sector

Due to restrained budgets, lack of collaboration, and process delays, government agencies in federal, state, and city municipal need a secure, cost-efficient network solution to speed IT transformation.

In addition, advances in digital society demands are compelling government agencies to reinvent their operations for streamlining workflows, improving the quality of citizen services, and achieving long-term cost savings.

Agencies are now modernizing their IT stack by:

• Transitioning to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments is helping consolidate applications and workflows to optimize remote working construct, eliminate server management concerns, and in turn save considerable time and money
• Automating internal operations is helping standardize repetitive, time-consuming, and complex processes, saving 50% of operational costs and hours of extensive manual labor. Ex: mailroom and accounts payable process automation
• Managing secure and efficient data transfers that allow for seamless citizen interactions across all digital channels, thus deriving crucial insights from their behavioral patterns

Agencies are also making smarter decisions by:

• Leveraging data analytics and API platforms that are helping distribute offerings across third parties to engage private partners and NGOs
• Enriching the end-user experience by understanding a user’s context and applying role-based access controls to their journey
• Building smarter and faster connected cities with a centralized network that can help effectively monitor, operate, and manage public infrastructure

Reducing Inefficiencies and Enabling Compliance

While the new digital technologies have brought about exciting growth opportunities for the public sector, lack of a supporting network infrastructure is stifling progress and draining efficiency.

WANs are an integral part of a government agency’s communications, as applications and services are dependent upon them.

Today’s WANs need to be flexible, as they support discrete network architectures, including data traffic and wireless network traffic. Network connections need to support the objectives and mobile strategies of government agencies while ensuring customer data is kept secure, confidential, and compliant. The WAN also needs to be performing optimally to maintain the quality of user experience.

Sadly, legacy WAN inefficiencies are growing by the day, unable to keep up with new technologies, changing consumer demands, creating massive performance and security bottlenecks.

Run primarily on bandwidth-limited, expensive MPLS private circuits, legacy WAN is falling short of meeting the needs of bandwidth-hungry cloud, AI, IoT, and Big Data applications. As more applications are deployed, the hub-and-spoke architecture with data center backhauling is delaying application access, slowing down processes, and leaving users frustrated.

With remote access and extensive cloud usage, the risk of cyberattacks is also increasing, and legacy WAN network with siloed security systems is incapable of securing confidential, critical assets and resources hosted on the cloud. Further, the complexity of legacy WAN’s hardware-centric architecture makes network management and new branch deployment an endless struggle, taking as long as three to six months, awfully slowing down time-to-market. Lastly, the legacy WAN network is no longer able to keep up with federal and state compliance requirements for security and privacy of data.

Modernizing the Network with Secure SD-WAN

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can help keep up with technology-enabled, new-age service models, government agencies are now turning to Secure SD-WAN. The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Secure SD-WAN makes applications run faster, safer, and more reliably. It delivers consistent and highest quality of experience for all application users irrespective of their location. Secure SD-WAN offers government agencies the freedom to adopt the application delivery infrastructure that best fits their work construct, without sacrificing performance, security, reliability, or control.

Retail:

Secure SD-WAN for Retail

Retailers need to deliver a world-class experience for their customers in omni-channel ways to increase customer acquisitions and retentions.

Retailers have understood that new in-store technologies require robust and efficient connections to databases and applications in the cloud or a data center. In fact, Gartner Inc. reports that American-based retail service organizations have been the most aggressive early adopters of SD-WAN.

Retail as an industry is evolving as more and more connected devices and applications are making their way into brick and mortar environments to become future proof in an age of e-commerce and mobility. This trend will intensify in the next decade with workloads and customer analytics moving to the cloud and proliferation of the Internet of Things and low-code rapid application development. There’s a lot to be excited about in this new age of retail and adopting new technologies will be key to engaging with customers, streamline operations, and drive profits.

Modernizing the Traditional Storefront

Most retail companies have multiple distributed stores, offices, and pop-up stores that require fast and reliable WAN connectivity to ensure customers and employees can efficiently work with their applications. A retail company’s ability to provide excellent customer service, and deliver the tools and support their employees need, can mean the difference between success and failure. But if a network outage or slow WAN connection frustrates customers and remote employees, they can lose revenue, and their brand can be at risk.

In other words, next-generation technologies require next-generation networks that are agile, cost-effective, and secure. Ensuring all store locations are connected continuously and networking effectively with head office, distribution, and the supply chain is paramount for retailers.

Employees and clients accessing applications from HQ data centers and cloud-hosted and SaaS-delivered sites need the apps to be fast, reliable, and secure. IT needs the WAN to be agile for easy deployment and management, and visibility to respond to dynamic network changes.

Traditional WAN Can No Longer Keep Up

Today’s WANs need to be flexible, as they support discrete network architectures, including data traffic and wireless network traffic. Network connections need to support a retailer’s business objectives and mobile strategies while ensuring customer data is kept secure. The WAN also needs to be performing optimally to maintain a user quality of experience.

WANs are an integral part of a retailer’s communications, as applications and services depend upon them. MPLS circuits have often been used to support these applications and services. Yet, many retailers are now looking for MPLS alternatives to lower costs, simplify deployments for new stores, and increase bandwidth, while ensuring security, reliability, and performance.

Secure SD-WAN is Required for the Store of the Future

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can constantly support increased traffic volume, improve real-time communication, secure cloud connectivity, reduce operational costs, and catalyze digital growth, retailers are now turning to Secure SD-WAN.

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure should not be necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Technology:

Secure SD-WAN for Technology Companies

Of all the industry sectors, technology companies are at the forefront of innovation: spearheading the digital revolution.

Technology explosion, increasing consumer demands, growing market disruptors, unpredictable geo-political conditions are all compelling technology companies to jump-start their digital transformation efforts. This results in increased demand to build agility and resilience essential for organizations to succeed in the modern, competitive landscape.

• The cloud has redefined efficiency and scalability for businesses today, especially multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud models. With remote working becoming the new norm, transitioning to cloud is helping provide easy application access to remote working employees, irrespective of their location.
• Big data, analytics, and machine learning are providing critical data driven insights helping make better informed business decisions
• Mobility is making it easier for employees seeking agility and flexibility, making the traditional office perimeter no longer necessary.
• Centralized control and automation are helping unify all siloed business entities and power them with real-time visibility and monitoring for increased operational efficiency and cost savings

Challenges with a Digital-First World

Technology-induced agility is key to winning in the digital-first world. And, agility is heavily reliant on the supporting network infrastructure.

Today’s powerful and sophisticated technologies place greater pressure on WAN networks that are unable to keep up with the increased demands and changing conditions. Legacy WAN challenges are creating significant bottlenecks for technology companies in implementing their digital strategies and realizing their potential benefits.

Run primarily on bandwidth-limited, expensive MPLS private circuits, legacy WAN networks are falling short of meeting the needs of bandwidth-hungry applications such as CRM, ER, voice and video conferencing. As more applications are deployed, and new cloud platforms are adopted, the hub-and-spoke architecture with data center backhauling is delaying application access, slowing down performance, and affecting user productivity.

With increased remote access and extensive cloud usage, the risk of cyberattacks is also growing, and legacy WAN network with siloed security systems is incapable of securing critical assets and resources hosted on the cloud.

Furthermore, the complexity of legacy WAN’s hardware-centric architecture makes network management and new branch deployment an endless struggle, taking as long as three to six months, awfully slowing down time-to-market in a fast-paced, competitive industry.

Driving Innovation with Secure SD-WAN

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can help keep up with technology-enabled, new-age business models, technology companies are now turning to Secure SD-WAN. The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Remote employees, partners, and customers need reliable, secure access to business-critical applications.

Secure SD-WAN makes these applications run faster, safer, and more reliably – delivering quality of user experience. It gives technology companies the freedom to adopt the WAN infrastructure they need, without sacrificing performance, security, reliability, or control. Quality access is critical in empowering remote working employees to continue to carry out business activities. Secure SD-WAN is helps deliver simple, reliable, secure, and optimized access to traditional and cloud applications. 

Working from Home with SD-WAN

As organizations adapt to remote working conditions, SD-WAN is becoming a powerful enabler for business continuity. With Versa Secure SD-WAN Appliance and Versa Secure SD-WAN using the Versa Titan service, technology companies can now:

• Provide multi-link home access (Broadband and LTE) for increased resiliency and application availability
• Isolate and secure segmentation of employees’ work assets from family assets
• Provide Wi-Fi capability with corporate access and DIA for non-corporate devices
• Adopt site-to-site VPN services to corporate and test locations
• Take advantage of Local Internet Breakout for non-work-related traffic
• Enforce advanced security to identify and protect assets against any inbound threats, as well as detect if any device on the home network was compromised
• Build resilient architecture to ensure Zoom and RingCentral services are always on, providing great call and video quality
• Leverage destination NAT for local personal hosted services

Transportation:

Secure SD-WAN for Transportation

Transportation and logistics organizations are tapping into the advantages of new digital technologies to streamline operations and drive profitability. Typically, transportation and logistics organizations such as aviation, freight forwarding, railways, ports, and shipping are widely distributed in nature, operating across different countries and continents.

Digital transformation is enabling these organizations with speed, consistency, and predictability that are crucial to running such large-scale network operations efficiently and thriving in the competitive tech-driven market.

Legacy Components and Systems are No Longer Sufficient

Transportation and logistics organizations are stepping beyond the regular RFID and GPS tracking systems. They are now investing in game-changing technologies such as automation, IoT, AI, Big Data, digital twin technologies, and robotics to build efficient, sustainable, and environment-friendly businesses.

Transportation organizations need to adopt:

• Cloud services that help enable scalable and efficient “platform-based business” models, thus yielding better profits and radically improving customer experience
• AI and ML-based algorithms offering real-time updates and predictive analysis derived out of consolidating information on changing traffic patterns, weather conditions, good’s movement, etc. to arrive at accurate ETAs and make smart decisions.
• IoT together with advanced analytics to offer improved visibility and greater control over inventory management and warehouse operations
• Automation to help improve cost-efficiency by eliminating the need for too many physical resources in everyday warehouse operations such as sorting and distribution
• 5G supported network to enable self-driving fleets and electric trucks that support an organizations’ efforts to cut down carbon emissions and foster sustainability

Reducing Management, Performance, and Security Challenges

Promising new technologies are undoubtedly offering endless possibilities for the transportation and logistics sector. Nevertheless, they are also introducing significant management, performance, and security challenges due to the lack of a supporting network infrastructure. Managing complex and geographically spread out operations of the transportation and logistics industries requires a secure, scalable, agile, and high-performing network infrastructure. On the contrary, legacy WAN inefficiencies are growing by the day, unable to keep up with changing demands, creating huge bottlenecks in service delivery.

Cloud applications and remote access have substantially increased traffic flow, constantly demanding more bandwidth. Legacy WAN running primarily on expensive, bandwidth-limited MPLS lines is unable to support increased bandwidth demands, leading to frequent network outages and latency issues halting mission-critical operations.

The hub-and-spoke architecture is further leading to operational delays by backhauling traffic to the data centers. One of the major pitfalls of the Legacy WAN network is the poor visibility it offers into system operations. Visibility is key to avoiding mismanagement and maintaining rigorous regulatory compliance, especially in the widely distributed transportation and logistics sector. The complexity of legacy WAN’s hardware-centric architecture makes network management and new branch deployment an endless struggle, taking as long as three to six months, awfully slowing down time-to-market.

As exciting as the new technologies are, they also present massive security risks. IoT sensors extensively used in delivery vehicles and other AI-based technologies are leaving security gaps that can lead to unthinkable security breaches and financial losses.

Secure Point A to B with Secure SD-WAN

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can constantly support increased traffic volume, improve real-time communication, secure cloud connectivity, reduce operational costs, and catalyze digital growth, transport and logistics organizations are now turning to Secure SD-WAN

The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.