How Does Netskope's SD WAN Transformation Revolutionise Your Enterprise Connectivity?
Author: Jake Hammacott
Release Date: 02/04/2025
The Disadvantages Associated with Remote Working
Organisations that lack robust and comprehensive enterprise connectivity are confronted with a multitude of obstacles that can severely impede their operations and growth. Productivity is often impacted as employees struggle with slow or unreliable connections, outdated technology, and incompatible systems. This can lead to frustration, decreased efficiency, and missed deadlines.
Scalability is also limited as businesses find it difficult to expand their operations or adapt to changing market conditions without a strong and flexible connective infrastructure. This can prevent them from taking advantage of new opportunities or responding effectively to competitive threats. Security vulnerabilities are another major concern, as poor connectivity can leave organisations exposed to cyberattacks, data breaches, and other security risks. This can result in significant financial losses, reputational damage, and legal liabilities. Furthermore, poor enterprise connectivity can hinder innovation by limiting access to new technologies and collaboration tools.
Ultimately, these challenges can have a significant impact on the bottom line, as businesses lose customers, miss out on revenue opportunities, and incur additional costs. In today's fast-paced and interconnected world, strong enterprise connectivity is essential for success. Organisations that fail to invest in this critical area will find themselves at a significant disadvantage.
Netskope addresses these challenges by providing a comprehensive security platform that enables secure access to applications and data, regardless of location. By leveraging a cloud-native architecture and advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, Netskope helps organisations to modernise their network infrastructure and enhance their security posture. This allows for seamless and secure connectivity, empowering users to work efficiently and securely from anywhere, while ensuring the protection of sensitive data.
Netskope & SD-WAN
Netskope are highly aware of common issues organisations face when adopting SD-WAN: “The explosion in volume of cloud applications and IoT devices means traditional SD-WAN solutions with controls based on application-centric policies are not enough, especially if the specific SD-WAN solution lacks zero trust principles”, meaning, more traditional SD-WAN solutions are not aware of threats and risks that come when different users, devices and applications interact with one another. Context-aware SD-WAN, empowered by zero trust, is essential for today's evolving enterprises. This solution ensures fast, reliable, and secure access to any application or device, regardless of location. It achieves this by providing full visibility and granular controls.
Netskope’s SD-WAN addresses the following common issues through the subsequent methods:
• Context Aware Borderless Networking: To promote and facilitate any-to-any communications, Netskope’s SD-WAN utilises the context around communication traffic and constantly asks: who, where and what, applications, users and devices are interacting with.
• Guaranteed Application Experience: Borderless SD-WAN delivers full visibility and comprehensive analytics into tens of thousands of applications, resulting in an optimal user experience with smart defaults that automatically prioritise applications depending on their context.
• Hybrid Network Security: Internally provided on-site security furnishes east-west segmentation at the enterprise perimeter to quarantine compromised devices and obstruct cyberattacks. Incorporation with SSE yields SASE advantages, and, thorough security.
• Utilising Machine Learning & AI: Borderless SD-WAN enhances network performance and end-user productivity by collecting data across the network—including remote users, branch offices, and cloud workloads—and using AI/ML to provide network engineers with predictive insights that simplify network optimisation.
Securing Users, Regardless of Location
When teams and employees can be complete worlds apart, with remote workers, international offices and cloud solutions being incorporated into day-to-day operations - it is vital that the same level of security is enforced on all users, devices and applications. Generic remote access VPNs don't provide visibility into who is requesting access, what devices they're using, and what applications they're trying to reach. Traditional SD-WAN solutions also lack zero trust capabilities and can't scale to meet the needs of every remote user. Zero trust network access (ZTNA) systems offer an alternative, but most don't have the optimisation benefits of SD-WAN.
The second challenge is performance. Traditional VPNs route traffic to remote workers through VPN concentrators deployed across multiple locations. This process can increase latency and negatively impact the user experience. Additional limitations arise because SD-WAN capabilities are often delivered via specialised hardware, which adds cost and complexity at remote sites, along with fragmented policies that govern VPN, security, and SD-WAN capabilities.
The solution to this is to integrate SD-WAN and security capabilities into a unified software client that runs on user endpoint devices. This approach enables simplicity, visibility, and secure and optimised connectivity for remote users, with consistent policy and application experience. It also allows network operators to deliver a unified policy framework that follows users wherever they go. By incorporating Netskope’s Endpoint SD-WAN and complementing it with a Netskope SSE integration, full visibility into all SD-WAN network activity can be achieved with security insights and incidents being promoted by the two solutions.
Wrapping up…
Ultimately, Netskope's SD-WAN solution is designed to revolutionise enterprise connectivity by creating a flexible and scalable network environment where users, devices, and applications can seamlessly connect and communicate, regardless of their physical location or network configuration. This is achieved without compromising security or control, as Netskope maintains comprehensive visibility into all network traffic and activities.
By implementing Netskope SD-WAN, organisations can overcome the limitations of traditional WAN architectures, which often struggle to keep up with the demands of modern, distributed workforces and cloud-based applications. The solution enables businesses to optimise network performance, reduce costs, and simplify management, all while ensuring that critical data and resources remain secure and accessible.
If you’d like to learn more about Netskope’s SD-WAN, or any of Netskope’s other offerings, please reach out to us by emailing us at info@somerfordassociates.com.
