Delivering Agility and Performance with Prisma SD-WAN Innovations

Branches as we know them have fundamentally changed. Organizations are met with new challenges as they fully return to prepandemic work environments. In today’s world, where 50% of all applications are SaaS and internet apps, current SD-WAN solutions are bookended, rigid, and complex, resulting in poor user experience, limited security, and significant operational complexity.

Businesses require a branch of the future built for today’s environments to deliver flexible connectivity, app-defined fabric, and superior security while simplifying operations, including complex Day-2 operations. Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE powers the branch of the future with next-generation SD-WAN to deliver exceptional user experience and Zero Trust security for all apps while automating complex IT operations.

Innovations to Accelerate Your Branch Modernizations

As part of our SASE Converge 2023 event, we recently announced key innovations like the application SLA framework and broad segmentation support to enhance your ability to deliver improved application performance and branch agility seamlessly.

Robust Application Framework to Deliver Exceptional Experience

Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN revolutionized the industry by providing traffic engineering based on application SLAs and network SLAs, unlike other SD-WAN solutions that are often book-ended and only rely on network SLAs. This enabled our customers to deliver improved performance for all applications, including SaaS and internet apps. With the newly introduced application SLA framework, businesses can now ensure visibility and control across the complete application lifecycle with three critical steps including:

• Measurement: Prisma SD-WAN accurately identifies all applications and sub-applications, helping to categorize and ensure the right application policies—including path policies, quality of service (QoS), and security—are applied correctly for intelligent traffic engineering and prioritization.
• Enforcement: Prisma SD-WAN monitors application performance to compute key SLAs such as translation failure, transaction time, MOS score, codec, server response time and round-trip delays, along with network SLAs such as Jitter, packet loss and latency. This ensures that the right remediation techniques like switching flows, failover, and Forward Error Correction (FEC) are applied when performance degradation is identified. Most importantly, we implemented FEC to be dynamic and adaptive to ensure it's automatically turned on or off and generates necessary encoded packets based on lossy links.
• Alerts: Prisma SD-WAN alerts customers about events like performance degradation, outages, and network changes to help them troubleshoot and resolve issues easily. We ensure these events are correlated, prioritized, and notified to improve root cause analysis and significantly reduce resolution cycles.

Broadest Support for Segmentation for Better Business Agility

Palo Alto Networks has always supported segmentation with Network Context. This highly innovative method isolates networks and users without requiring any changes to networks or routes. At the same time, we understand that some customer deployments use virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) to segment networks inherited from their traditional architectures or, in mergers and acquisitions, add new branch networks that leverage VRF. Keeping these in mind, we recently introduced support for VRF to help businesses seamlessly migrate to SD-WAN while managing their granular segmentation seamlessly.

At Palo Alto Networks, innovations never stop. We believe these new capabilities will further benefit our customers in delivering exceptional user experience and improved security outcomes while significantly simplifying operations. Watch our SASE Converge Virtual Event on-demand to learn more about these innovations.