This blog is part of the “Branch of the Future” series where we take a closer look at the four key tenets that next-generation SD-WAN and SASE provide to deliver a branch network that is digital-first, secure and powered by the latest AI/ML innovations.
Digital transformation has accelerated dramatically in the last few years with 95% of organizations stating that they are already using public cloud services, and will continue to increase the number of business applications that reside in the public cloud over the next 36 months. Additionally, the use of modern collaboration and video-conferencing apps has increased during the pandemic, with the number of video-conferencing devices expected to grow six times by 2025.
As organizations adapt to these cloud-first and hyper-digital ways of working, ensuring high-quality performance and great user experience with modern applications has become critical criteria for selecting the right networking solution.
Traditional router-based architectures are rigid and complex and force backhauling the user-to-application traffic to the data center. This creates higher latency and round trip delays, resulting in poor user experience. Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) was introduced to solve this problem. While it delivered direct-to-app access, it failed significantly in providing a seamless user experience and great performance for today's apps. The legacy SD-WAN solutions are unable to provide application service level agreements (SLAs) that are crucial to delivering core functionalities like intelligent traffic forwarding, failover and load balancing.
In order to deliver exceptional user experience for apps like software as a service (SaaS), Unified communication as a service (UCaaS), and other business-critical applications, an SD-WAN solution must provide key capabilities including:
Most importantly, the ideal SD-WAN solution must use these capabilities to ensure the best performance and user experience. Understand why app-defined SD-WAN is important to deliver improved performance for today's applications.
Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN provides an app-defined fabric that understands applications from Layer 3 to Layer 7. This application-aware architecture, unlike legacy solutions that are packet-based and rely on Layer 3 information, empowers customers to build the branch of the future by providing:
Figure 1: Application-aware architecture provides both application SLA and network SLA workflows.
Figure 2: Prisma SD-WAN Bandwidth Utilization dashboard easily visualizes which applications are using the most bandwidth.
Organizations can now deliver exceptional user experience for all their applications with Prisma SD-WAN’s app-defined architecture. We’ve partnered with SDxCentral to showcase how Prisma SASE with Prisma SD-WAN delivers a next-generation SD-WAN solution to truly transform the branch, secure your network holistically, and automate complex IT operations for an exceptional user experience. Watch the on-demand exclusive virtual event to learn more.
By submitting this form, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge our Privacy Statement. Please look for a confirmation email from us. If you don't receive it in the next 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.