The market consideration and adoption of software-defined WAN represents the largest WAN transformation in recent history. Organizations are turning to SD-WAN to improve connectivity, reduce costs, and simplify management at their branch locations. In fact, a recent research study from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)  found that 4 out of 5 organizations report using SD-WAN in some capacity already. Instead of backhauling all traffic through the corporate network, the research also indicated that 79 percent of organizations are shifting to direct internet access (DIA) for all or some remote and branch offices.*  With DIA, enterprises can accelerate their digital transformation with faster access to cloud applications and workloads. While the benefits are clear, this also introduces new security challenges.

The shift to SD-WAN creates new security challenges

Security has to be top of mind as you transform your network with SD-WAN and move to DIA. Branch offices and roaming users are more vulnerable to attacks, and attackers quickly exploit weaknesses. Based on the ESG research, 68 percent of branch offices and roaming users were the source of compromise in recent attacks. And as organizations move to more DIA, this becomes an even greater risk. Scaling security at every location often means more appliances to ship and manage, more policies to separately maintain, which translates into more money and resources needed.

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