The Benefits of Optimizing Your SD-WAN for Compliance and Security are Tremendous

Introduction

Businesses face many challenges with strict compliance and security demands in the turbulent world of digital transformation that we live in. With businesses expanding and deploying more and more complex network systems, SD-WAN – Software-Defined Wide Area Networks has become a great tool for network-focused optimization. By fine-tuning your SD-WAN configurations can your optimization deliver additional benefits such as compliance and improved security? This blog informs how sharp settings can improve your ability to remain compliant and safe. Additionally, we will discuss possible benefits from renting firewalls, servers, and routers.

Compliance

Compliance is essential in the context of business and people’s concerns about their data. From the European-wide GDPR, through the US/International HIPAA, to the Payment card industry data security standard — PCI DSS, every business handling sensitive information needs to comply with industry regulations and standards. Otherwise, the cost of being caught could be recorded in fines, reputation, and legal measures. The main challenges posed by compliance are:

• Data protection, i.e., encryption in transit and at rest.
• Access control, or making data inaccessible for the wrong people.
• Audit trails, or keeping all activity for auditing purposes.
• Incident response, which includes reacting rapidly to breaches.
• Regulatory updates, as every regulation evolves and changes.

According to the list, SD-WAN can be the game-changing solution introducing SD-WAN requires careful compliance configuration and strategy afterward. What should your SD-WAN settings be tuned for compliance?

SD-WAN Settings to Tune for Compliance

For various non-functional examples, on CCWAN, the following principles of the levy should be followed:

1. Segmentation and isolation. The model is divided into multiple parts:
2. Policy-based routing — Write rules for policy-based routing to guarantee your critical data only takes secure, compliant paths. Such as ensuring healthcare data is through proper encrypted tunnels and complies with HIPAA.
3. Categorize the various application traffic priorities to avoid data availability and data integrity compliance issues.
4. Real-time Monitoring: Establish real-time monitoring and alerts to identify any breaches of compliance policies in advance.
5. Bandwidth Management – Manage network bandwidth more suitably to maintain effective and secure data transfer. Blocking non-essential traffic can assist in staying corporately compliant.
6. Firmware Updates: Always install the latest SD-WAN firmware on your devices to remove security bugs and keep up with new standards.
7. Centralized Management — A centralized SD-WAN management console can simplify setting up policy changes and compliance sit-ins, enabling configurations consistent for the network.

Security Enhancements

Yes – you need to get compliant — but it is also about security. Senior Vice President of Product Development at GTT Cliff Kane claims that honing SD-WAN can form the basis for a much more robust security strategy for any firm:

1. Encrypt: All the data we send through an SD-WAN should be encrypted. Protect data in transit using strong encryption standards like AES-256.
2. Advanced Threat Detection: This integrates SD-WAN with full threat detection and can be rolled out to detect potential threats in real-time. IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems).
3. Identity and Access Management — Provide tight authentication mechanisms and access controls within the SD-WAN itself to restrict unauthorized user access to your system.
4. Secure Connectivity: Secure, high-performance encrypted links between branch offices, data centers, and cloud services. By this, we make a smaller attack radius and secure the communication.
5. Integrate SD-WAN with NG Firewalls for Extra Layer of Security. This is also especially powerful when renting firewalls as this enables you to have your firewall replacement, integrated ready, and all patches up-to-date without spending buy upfront.
6. Zero Trust Architecture: Utilize Zero Trust architecture, verifying and validating every device or user seeking to connect to the network. This decreases the risk of both internal and external threats significantly.
7. Incident Response Automation: Incident detection and response procedures are automated to rapidly address any suspected security breaches. An automatic response can more quickly contain threats and reduce the damage that any advantage results from it.

Conclusion

Proactive fine-tuning of SD-WAN configurations improves network performance and ensures that the business remains competitive, in compliance with industry regulations and protected security-wise. It should not be an afterthought in 2020 since SD-WAN offers the agility and scalability that businesses require to meet challenges of modern digital operations. In addition, there can be significant benefits for businesses that need cost-effective ways to remain compliant and maintain security requirements through renting firewalls, servers, and even routers. This alternative gives organizations the ability to use the latest technology with no capital expense and also allows for expansion or reduction based on ever-changing requirements. SD-WAN configuration is meticulous work that needs to be just right and moreover, requires consistent tuning in order for businesses to build the strongest and most compliant security network environments possible without ever compromising sensitive data nor risk losing customer trust.