You can even automate monitoring to provide real-time visibility, rather than wait for reports to identify any issues. All this and more helps IT  improve user quality and gain agility in the migration to the digital future.

Increased security

The pandemic required millions of people worldwide to start working from home or remotely, relying on their own endpoint devices and domestic broadband connections. The scale of this shift to working from home has introduced new challenges to IT, including managing security in a more universal model.

And this is where the secured access service edge (SASE) comes into play. Pronounced “sassy,” SASE is a framework identified by Gartner as the way to securely connect entities such as users, systems, and endpoint devices to applications and services when their locations may be anywhere.

Securing your gateway to the Internet has always been part of SD-WAN, and now with the emergence of cloud-based security partners, we’ve advanced our security offer with the ability to deliver extensive security options from the cloud to cover remote users and other endpoints. 

This holistic approach between the branch and the cloud ensures our SD-WAN and SASE delivery is fit for purpose instead of a one-size-fits approach.

How to get started

If the cost, performance and digital transformation benefits of SD-WAN and the enhanced security available with SASE sound like a logical next move, here are four steps to investigate your options.

The first thing to do is take stock of where you are today and where your data traffic is going to be. This will involve coordinating inputs and objectives among colleagues to find out if your current set-up is working well or if there is scope for improvement. How many sites and people are you dealing with? Is that number likely to change? Have you been experiencing any quality, bandwidth, cost or customer service issues with your current underlay and MPLS?

This assessment has to address any future plans, of course, such as whether you are intending to migrate apps and/or data to the cloud or whether you have any business app modernization programs in place or about to begin. SAP’s S/4 HANA impending migration deadline, for example, will involve a massive shift to the cloud for all SAP users.

Your assessment must also look at security levels in your organization. Does your data feel secure to you right now? Have you conducted any security tests across your network?

Also consider your organization’s resource capabilities. Do you have—or want to have—the specialist skills needed to optimize your network and security, and the different skills to orchestrate those factors on a daily basis? Could you realistically recruit those skills if you did need them?

With this information in place, the second step is to assess your options based on your current network and what a future topology could look like. In this phase, you are basically creating your strategy. Here you are most likely going to need specialist input to advise you on factors such as whether you actually need SD-WAN or which SD-WAN set up you require, whether it is a good fit for the countries where you operate (some may not have the necessary infrastructure yet) or whether you have time to deploy a phased approach in which, rather than fully migrate, you keep half on-premises and half in the cloud.

If you decide to proceed from here, the next step is vendor and carrier selection. Again, you will likely need vendor-agnostic specialist input here to consider your hardware, software and underlay network carrier options. From the available options, you will need to assess which one gives you the right functionality for your needs without investing in unnecessary capabilities. On the carrier side, ideally you do not want to be taking advice from a network operator but from an organization that works with all carriers globally and who can give you unbiased advice.

That’s quite a breadth of knowledge needed, and it has to be specific to the APAC region of course, where knowledge about network carriers country by country—even city by city—will make a massive difference to the quality and cost of the final result.

Step four is to find out whether you can actually deliver the potential value you identified in step one. Ultimately, SD-WAN has to enable you to do something new, better and at lower cost. And you want to find whether this is viable at the lowest cost possible with zero risk to current operations. Here Expereo recommends a Proof of Value (PoV) approach. This is different from the conventional Proof of Concept (PoC), which focuses on technical delivery rather than whether the implementation can deliver tangible business benefits.