To discuss the business benefits of a Software-driven Wide Area Network over traditional WAN architecture, Fortinet presented a panel discussion titled Connecting your Business to productivity, flexibility, and affordability

as part of the Technology Series ‘Securing Your Digital Journey’ in association with CNBC TV18.

In a session moderated by Gautam Srinivasan, industry experts Deputy Vice-President and Head of IT Infrastructure at Bharti AXA, Amit Singh, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Ecom Express, Amit Choudhary, and Vice-President of Sales, India SAARC and South-East Asia, Vishak Raman at Fortinet discussed what the software-defined WAN architecture brings to the table for enterprises with multiple branch office.

The growth of cloud technologies has brought about various networking and security complexities. However, the implementation of a secure SD-WAN architecture can help overcome networking and security challenges, leading to positive business outcomes and providing instant ROI benefits as well as lower TCO. According to Vishak, in today's business landscape, applications are driving the organization, and they are mainly on the cloud, which calls for a better user application experience. A software-defined network can significantly improve the application experience and bring resilience and security to the network. Network architects have a great opportunity to re-architect the system and improve performance, create application-aware networks, and integrate security into a holistic approach.

When we look at a software-defined approach to wide-area networking how is it impacting the logistics industry? What are the CAPEX and OPEX benefits that are brought to the table? Sharing his thoughts Mr. Amit Choudhary said, "At Ecom Express, we have a huge network of facilities. From 3000+ delivery centres, a multitude of sortation centres, and more. We need everything to be connected reliably. In the earlier tech, we always had concerns related to link up-time, link availability, provisioning, and SLAs extending to days which we could not afford. We have fulfilment centres across the country, and we need everything to be turned around in a smaller time frame. SD-WAN gives us that flexibility on not having to provision several links but go through the journey with several other options. We call it the broadband virtualizer wherein you can plug in a hotspot or a data card to provide connectivity at our last-mile centers. SD-WAN provides us with optimal price-performance so we can bring 99.99% scalability at a reduced cost realizing a savings of 2x."

Moving on, they explored how SD-WAN supports complex branch deployments with advanced routing and cloud capabilities while improving the business application experience. Sharing his thoughts on this Mr. Amit Singh said, "We are using a hybrid environment at Bharti AXA. At the branch level, we have prioritized the entire application traffic so that customers get real-time inputs and a better user experience when they walk into our branch. Earlier there were performance issues, but after we shifted from traditional WAN to SD-WAN, it has helped increase our resilience. Depending on the business needs we are able to optimize network and application availability, few branches are prioritized in terms of sales, and few are prioritized in terms of operations."

How can organizations convert from SD-WAN to SD-Branch to truly optimize application experience? Sharing his thoughts Mr. Choudhary said, "We call it application engineering. What happens is that certain applications need the bandwidth. So, we have interactive applications and we have a few background applications. We need to figure out a balance between these two applications, the applications that really need real-time sensitivity can be engineered for better performance using SD-WAN. This also helps us to push the non-bandwidth-hogging applications down and focus on the time-sensitive business applications so that my operations team can actually perform both things in the same time frame."

Mr. Vishak summarized the conversation by stating that branches are now primarily remote-isolated transaction operators. Therefore, SD-WAN needs to enhance its performance at the branch level with application-aware intelligence and a resilient approach to ensure uninterrupted business even during link fluctuations. From a security perspective, containing malware at the branch level without affecting the data center is crucial. Therefore, security should be embedded across the entire branch level, and Secure SD-WAN can help detect and remediate threats faster and provide automation. It is important to converge SD-WAN and security into a Secure SD-WAN and build an intelligent network architecture for the future.

They also go on to discuss the security-drive approaches to increase productivity, flexibility, and affordability. Check out the full episode here: https://youtu.be/FLN4Tq4PAcA]

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