Comparing SD-WAN Vendors: Security

If your company is researching SD-WAN, there are a few main areas where vendors differ drastically.

One of them is security. Some don’t offer it, and some do…

And the vendors who offer it, differ in the type of security offered.

In this short video, Mike Smith explains the 3 primary options your company will have to choose from, when it comes to security offerings, from SD-WAN vendors.

Want Mike to tell you the best handful of SD-WAN vendors to quote? Ask him today.

Ask Mike

About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript

SD-WAN is the big thing out there right now when it comes to wide area networking and companies with multiple locations trying to connect their servers to one another, also trying to connect from site to cloud and optimize those connections. It’s all about SD-WAN these days. Well, one of the things that you want to consider when you’re comparing SD-WAN solutions from different vendors is security. There are some different options when it comes to security.

So the first thing that some of the providers offer are firewall agnostic solutions, meaning that it doesn’t matter if you want to use your own firewalls and your own security solution in-house, you absolutely don’t want a service provider to take that over. Maybe you guys just purchased a bunch of Meraki devices everywhere just a year ago, and you still have a lot of time left before those are end of life. You want to look for an SD-WAN service provider that is what I call security or firewall agnostic, meaning that they work very well, they play very well with your on-site security at all your different locations.

The second option is to get a service provider that has built-in security along with their SD-WAN solution. So maybe your firewalls or your security solution is end of life. If that’s the case, and you’re also looking at SD-WAN, a good option is to tie the two together. So you can do that. And if you want to do that, you want to think about a couple of different things. Do you want just a stateful firewall for your company security? Or do you want next-gen security? Meaning intrusion detection, content filtering, things like that, more than just a stateful firewall. Some SD-WAN service providers only offer a stateful firewall built-in, while others offer a next-gen solution that is built-in.

So number one, think about, do you need security agnostic? Number two, do you want a built-in security solution? And then if you do, do you want stateful firewall, or do you want next-gen firewall? And then number three, if you want a built-in security solution, what you want to think about, do you want the security decision-making to take place in the cloud or on-premise? The difference is, if the security decisions are being handled in the cloud, the only traffic you want, internet traffic that’s being sent down to each location is the clean internet traffic, ideally. So ideally, this should free up your bandwidth quite a bit. If all the bad internet traffic is being blocked at the cloud level and not sent down through your internet circuit, you should have a lot more available internet access.

Conversely, some customers, you guys are IT professionals, you know better than I do. So for some reason, some people want all that decision-making handled on-prem. In that case, you’re going to look for SD-WAN solutions that have a built-in security solution that’s handling all the decision-making on-prem. It’s probably going to be an on-prem only SD-WAN solution. You might want to reference some of my other videos, when I talk about the different types of SD-WAN, mainly cloud enabled versus on-prem only solutions.

So those are the three things you really want to keep in mind. Number one, do we want a security agnostic solution or a built-in solution? And if you want to built-in solution, do you want the solution to be stateful firewall or next-gen? And number three, do you want on-prem security decision making or in the cloud decision-making?

I hope that helps a little bit. If you want to know which SD-WAN vendors are the best fit for your company, there’s like a hundred of them out there, or more. If you want to know which ones are the best fit for your company, don’t scour the internet. Don’t talk to a bunch of people, just contact me (714-593-0011 [email protected]). This is actually my job. I’m a broker for all the major SD-WAN service providers and vendors, as well as internet service providers, hosted VoIP, things like that. Just call me, I’m happy to ask you a couple of questions about your company’s needs and give you my recommendations on the best handful of SD-WAN vendors that your company should be quoting and why.

Again, you won’t find this information on Google. You can try all day, it’s just going to waste a ton of your time. Just call me, and guess what? The SD-WAN vendors, they pay our company our broker fee. So your company doesn’t have to pay us anything. It doesn’t cost you a dime. There’s no excuse not to call me. So just pick up the phone, shoot me an email, and I’m happy to give you my recommendations for the best SD-WAN service providers for your company’s needs. I hope that helps with SD-WAN a little bit. Have a great day.