SD-WAN and the End of Hub-and-Spoke

This is the final piece in a four-part series by Tony Burgess:  SD-WAN, IoT, and the disruptor taking aim at the enterprise firewall market.  You can read the series in its entirety here. 

Over the past decade, internet traffic has only continued to grow in both volume and importance. Today, even the largest and fastest ASIC firewalls are reaching the limits of their capacity, and causing increasingly intolerable latency in enterprise networks. Global organizations no longer count on bigger data centers and fatter pipes to connect a single huge network. Instead, they scale by initiating new availability zones and regions optimized to provide local business continuity and quality of service. Compute and storage resources are auto-scaled for efficiency, and even global databases are adapting with distributed and eventual-consistency models. 

All of this makes the walled hub-and-spoke model obsolete, at least for large, distributed enterprises. Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) is the new paradigm that is replacing it. And the transport-virtualization and traffic-intelligence capabilities that Barracuda has developed and refined over more than a decade are the essential tools you need to make the transition to SD-WAN easily and securely.

With SD-WAN done right, every remote location and every IoT device gets its own internet breakout and its own full-featured firewall. You connect your network nodes with whatever shaped VPN mesh you like. Plus every virtual location in the public cloud gets a virtual firewall. And the firewalls all work together to create, connect, and protect a flexible, frictionless, rapidly changing network that has no defined perimeter.

No other vendor besides Barracuda offers a line of enterprise-ready firewalls that combine a full stack of advanced security capabilities with powerful, easy-to-use SD-WAN capabilities. And none of the big enterprise firewall vendors are likely to anytime soon. That’s because their ASIC-based firewalls simply cannot be re-worked to meet this new set of requirements. Even their connectivity protocols are unchangeable. Instead, they’re busily decompiling their chips to regain the flexibility of traditional code, while scrambling to spin up some SD-WAN features. But it’s a big job, and it will take a while.

 

An Opportunity for Disruption

Whether by foresight, vision, serendipity, or a combination of all three, Barracuda has a ten-year head start on delivering the firewalls that the enterprise needs right now.  Barracuda is already reshaping the enterprise firewall market and leaving current leaders behind, with everything from the world’s first IoT firewall to the first Microsoft Azure certified security solution and the first network firewall on Google Cloud Platform.  Barracuda solutions allow you to secure even the smallest things on the largest networks in one single, easy-to-use central management interface.  

In today’s network environment—with ever-growing IoT and other highly distributed networks, and with cloud-integrated everything, and with the need for SD-WAN making itself more evident every day—I wouldn’t bet against Barracuda.