While software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) offer major performance and convenience advantages over the traditional WAN, these benefits come at the expense of centralized security from backhauling traffic through the organization’s main data center.

Vulnerabilities associated with an expanding branch network attack surface, increasing infrastructure complexity, and a rapidly evolving threat landscape call for secure networking—namely, deep integration between networking and security capabilities at a platform level. Effective SD-WAN also requires sophisticated management and orchestration capabilities for automatically selecting the best network paths based on contextual factors such as the specific application in use, business priorities, and security risks.

When doing initial exploration of SD-WAN, network engineering and operations leaders can use the following checklist of questions to determine which solution is best.

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