SD-WAN: How to Leverage Next-Gen Networks Without Adding Cyber Risk

Written by Michael Rezek
January 25, 2021

Digital transformation was helping businesses to streamline processes long before the pandemic.

… stolen or guessed access credentials, for example.

Get Proactive

It’s vital that channel firms looking to support customers with SD-WAN deployments clearly understand these potential security implications before starting projects. Always consult the relevant subject matter experts on your team right at the outset to anticipate and address any problems. So where do you go from here?

Perimeter protection is a great first step, but it must be enhanced with next-generation intrusion detection (IDS), which offers full visibility into network traffic, wherever it flows, and network detection and response (NDR) capabilities to rapidly detect suspicious behavior such as lateral movement. It’s important here to find a provider capable of logging data for up to a year, to enhance forensics and visibility of attacks, in a way that is economically viable and operationally feasible. This isn’t necessarily the case with all providers and will depend on whether they capture micro-detail per packet intelligence in the form of metadata or full packets, for example. Once that’s in place, also consider web filtering, SSL, IPSec inspection and sandboxing.

The final blend of security technologies you choose will depend on your specific risk appetite and the kind of customers you’re managing. But defence-in-depth is always the right strategy. Digital transformation is helping many organizations to weather the worst of the pandemic, and it will continue to drive growth after the crisis has receded. To support customer demands for optimized, cloud-delivered application experiences for their employees, secure SD-WAN is an increasingly compelling option.

Michael Rezek is vice president of business development and cybersecurity strategy at Accedian Networks, where he is responsible for Accedian’s cybersecurity strategy. He has more than 20 years senior sales and business development experience, including 15 years at Cisco where he led cross-functional and cross-organizational teams to drive complex infrastructure, network and managed service solutions for carriers and enterprise accounts. Rezek has cybersecurity and networking expertise in L1-3 networking and L2-7 performance management and an analytical and creative problem-solving skill set developed during his engineering career. He earned his master’s in electrical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and is licensed as a professional engineer. You may follow him on LinkedIn or @Accedian on Twitter.