Your Right to Choose Your WAN Connectivity and Your Right to Security

Still too often, nowadays, I look at my phone and my stomach drops.

I see: “3G”…

Even worse, I see: “1x”…

I think to myself: It’s the year 2015 and the world is becoming increasingly digitized. IDC’s Internet of Things Forecast states that there will be 4 billion people using 50 billion devices all in one hyper-connected world. I (along with 3,999,999,999 other people) believe it is my right to always have a consistent and high-performing 4G-LTE connection.

For the enterprise, Cisco’s SD-WAN Bill of Rights talks about what customers should expect and demand as they prepare their WAN for tomorrow. Among these rights are two that are very important to branch security in particular:

1) Your Right to Choose Your WAN Connectivity

You have the right to choose the WAN transport that best suits your ever-changing needs for bandwidth, security, and performance. With the increased reliability of the Internet for WAN transport and limited WAN budgets, organizations have turned to opening up their branches to Direct Internet Access (DIA).

(Direct Internet Access)

As a result, organizations can reduce bandwidth costs and improve the user application experience. However, it may also expose the organization to increased security risks.

2) Your Right to Secure Your Applications and Infrastructure

You have a right to the same security on public Internet and 4G LTE connections as on your private WAN through a consistent, layered security approach at all points of the network infrastructure. Comprehensive security should be integrated and provide protection across the attack continuum – before, during, and after an attack. This would include next-generation firewall protection, signature-based intrusion detection and prevention, cloud web security, and more.

If you would like to learn more about exercising these rights and how Cisco’s branch security portfolio will help secure your business for digital transformation and extend enterprise-level security everywhere, we invite you to join us to get more details at the below webinar on December 8, 2015, from 10 – 11 a.m. PST.

Hai Bo Ma (Product Manager) and Robb Boyd (host of Cisco’s TechWise TV), are the speakers. An overview of the agenda and link to register for both the live as well as on-demand sessions are available here.

I look forward to your attendance!