Remote working or working from home (WFH) has become the new normal and for many companies and their staff it is likely to remain a permanent feature of employment for the foreseeable future.
As the network perimeter has moved from the branch office to the home office there is a pressing need for enterprises to apply the same policies (security, application prioritisation, etc.) regardless of the employee location or network device. Traditional VPN solutions, while providing security in the form of encryption, do not offer any solutions for application prioritisation or Quality of Service and in some cases can cause further problems by requiring traffic to be directed to a location that might not otherwise be suitable given the traffic type, SaaS applications for example.
While SD-WAN has in recent years become the go to solution for enterprise WAN connectivity, deployment complexities and in particular the cost of SD-WAN hardware and licenses has meant that WFH with the benefits that SD-WAN brings has been reserved for larger enterprises and even then for key personnel.
Not anymore.
As a result of SD-WAN solution design and deployment advances in areas such as Cloud native economies of scale and Zero Touch Provisioning, SD-WAN can now be deployed in the home office for less than the cost* of a coffee a day subject as you would expect to some minimum term commitments.
Remote Working (WFH) SD-WAN Use Case
We have covered SD-WAN features and benefits in some detail in previous blogs. Key features for Remote Working / WFH scenarios are:
- Cloud Native Management
- Zero Touch Provisioning
- Intent Driven Business Policy
- Cloud Scale Visibility
- Cloud Scale VPN
- Secure Overlay
- Intelligent Control Plane
- Security Insertion
- Assured Application Performance
- Link and Application Monitoring
- Application Steering
- Application Performance
to ensure
- Secured access (TLS or IP-SEC tunnels)
- Improved performance both directions (uplink and downlink)
- Policing of traffic and priority management over home LAN, e.g. Teams given priority over Netflix
- No capacity to enter Enterprise network from home LAN
- No need for VPN client on user device, e.g. laptop
- Full authentication end to end consistent with Enterprise system
- Where required for capacity or resilience reasons service delivery over multiple links (wired or wireless)
SD-WAN for the Home Office from Iricent securely and cost effectively extends the enterprise network and the power of cloud delivered and managed networking to employees, IT staff and executives working from home.
If you would like more information on WFH with SD-WAN or would like to discuss specific requirements or plans, please feel free to contact us at: info@iricent.com or on Twitter @Iricent
*Based on accounting for the cost of the thin edge SD-WAN CPE device hardware over three years along with a three-year license subscription.