SD-WAN appliances in the home may be a boon for IT

 While SD-WAN appliances in the home may be a boon for IT, Valente writes that they also need to be transparent to the employee. SASE, Gartner’s hot new product category, combines the best parts of SD-WAN with cloud-delivered security functionality like secure web gateways, ZTNA, and cloud access security brokers (CASB). SASE’s low barrier to entry, subscription pricing model, and software endpoint made it a relatively painless alternative to VPNs or expensive SD-WAN appliances.

In many ways, the pandemic was responsible for catapulting the adoption of SASE into the spotlight far sooner than many had expected. This led vendors like Palo Alto Networks, VMware, Fortinet, Versa, and of course Cisco to develop and launch SASE offerings of their own.

While SD-WAN is a part of the SASE offering, it’s usually associated with branch connectivity rather than remote access. But as difference between computer science and computer engineering, and others like Fortinet’s CMO John Maddison, have pointed out repeatedly over the past year, SD-WAN appliances still have a place in the home office, at least for certain workers.