The branch as we know has changed. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption has accelerated to boost employee productivity and maintain business continuity. At the same time, applications have become more dynamic and vulnerable to increased threats. The demand to secure and deliver better application performance is more significant than ever.

Legacy solutions need to address the demands of today's branch with the complexity of managing archaic, point solutions that add overhead to IT teams. The right solution should securely deliver application assurance for all applications, including SaaS applications, while significantly simplifying IT teams' operations.

Most SD-WAN solutions bookend and depend on network service level agreements (SLAs) for traffic forwarding decisions, which hinder the ability to support SaaS application performance. They rely on security solutions with overly permissive policies, failing to provide the continuous trust verification and inspection required for all users and applications like SaaS and artificial intelligence (AI). Furthermore, most SD-WAN solutions offer a fragmented and disparate interface, increasing troubleshooting and resolution time.

The ideal SD-WAN solution should deliver foundational SD-WAN capabilities that can deliver performance at the last mile and extend these capabilities to a middle mile that is distributed, global and scalable across multiple cloud environments.

Additionally, it should address application server issues at the first mile which can significantly impact the user experience. Organizations need to deliver application assurance while simplifying branch operations that can reduce issue resolution time with comprehensive visibility and the power of AI.

Prisma® SASE powers the Zero Trust Branch with best-in-class SD-WAN to deliver exceptional user experience, integrated security for users and apps and operational resiliency and simplicity with AI/ML. We introduced innovations during our industry-leading event, SASE Converge to help organizations overcome these challenges and deliver a Zero Trust Branch.

These innovations include:

End-to-end Application Assurance for Exceptional User Experience

• Last-mile connections cause the most impact on branches, which are highly susceptible to disruptions and delays. Prisma SD-WAN measures not only network SLAs but also application metrics like transaction time, mean opinion score (MOS), application server response time and much more. In addition to ensuring accurate identification, classification and traffic steering for application traffic with support for failovers across all available WAN links, Prisma SD-WAN optimizes application traffic using techniques like forward error correction (FEC) and packet duplication to address lossy links.
• Prisma SD-WAN extends all these capabilities to Prisma Access while its hyperscaler backbone delivers high resiliency and network reliability in the middle mile.
• Prisma SD-WAN seamlessly discovers and establishes robust, optimized path policies to the most optimal Prisma SASE App Acceleration nodes in the SASE network, thereby accelerating the access of these SaaS applications from the branch and overcoming server issues at the first mile.

Figure 1: Application assurance for all applications

Operational Resiliency and Simplicity Powered by AI

• Prisma SD-WAN delivers actionable SD-WAN analytics and segment-wise insights into application performance with natively integrated ADEM, enabling IT leaders to troubleshoot and resolve issues faster for a better end-user experience.
• Strata Copilot, now enhanced for Prisma SD-WAN, uses natural language processing to enable administrators to query based on natural language. This provides freeform and curated questions for SD-WAN based on your network's health. Additionally, Strata Copilot provides relevant suggestions, helps perform guided and automated network-centric actions, and provides access to product collateral, reducing the need for specialized training.

Figure 2: Single console to manage SASE and simplify operations.

Prisma SD-WAN and Prisma SASE offer significant value in powering your Zero Trust branch with 98% time saved in SD-WAN policy management, 107% average ROI and 75% efficiency gain in managing SASE and making policy changes.

Learn more about our innovations in the on-demand SASE Converge sessions.