The Best SD-WAN Vendors: Firewall and Security Options

How will SD-WAN affect your company’s firewall and security? Will SD-WAN “play nice” with your existing firewall setup? Does SD-WAN include a firewall? What about content filtering and next-gen, UTM security options, like IPS and IDS?

Watch the video below to learn the basics of how to think about firewall and security, when it comes to SD-WAN.

Which SD-WAN vendors are the best fit for your company? Click the button below to ask Mike.

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About the Host
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. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript:

Okay. So your company is looking at SD-WAN, maybe to improve cloud efficiency or maybe to replace an MPLS network.

Whatever the reason, one of the things you definitely want to take into consideration is security. So depending on what your company’s firewall and security needs are, that’s going to really dictate the type of SD-WAN service providers that you look at.

And the way that I do it, I categorize SD-WAN service providers into three buckets when it comes to security.

The first bucket is they are completely firewall agnostic. These providers specialize in having nothing to do with firewalls. So this is a great option if you already have your firewalls and security in place and you don’t want to touch them at all, and you just want an SD-WAN service provider to come in and be plug and play and completely play well with your existing firewall and security setup.

Okay, that’s option number one. Option number two are SD-WAN service providers who offer stateful firewall only. So they do offer a build-in firewall package, but it’s just a stateful firewall. It doesn’t do a whole lot. It’s not the full-blown security.

Which leads me to option number three, SD-WAN service providers with a built-in, full next gen UTM security package, which includes content filtering, intrusion detection, all of that built in.

So, depending on what your company’s firewall and security option … or what your needs are, you’re going to want to choose an SD-WAN service provider in one of those three buckets.

I hope that helps a little bit. If you have any questions or if you want some recommendations on what service providers might be the best fit for your company’s specific security needs, feel free to reach out. I’m happy to help. Email me or call us at 877-465-3505.