Accelerating Digital Transformation with Secure SD-WAN
Versa Networks
April 2, 2020
Fiserv is the biggest financial company you may never have heard of. Every non-cash financial transaction that you conduct touches their network. Security is paramount for you—the consumer; for Fiserv’s clients—financial institutions, point-of-sale and payment industries in more than 100 countries; and for Fiserv’s global corporate network. Look at the staggering numbers on the right!
If a company this size can successfully deploy a Secure SD-WAN, then the early adopter phase must be long over. It is. Mainstream companies like Fiserv are now deploying SD-WAN technology to manage—or survive—this era of rapid digital transformation. Which is not necessarily super-disruptive: SD-WAN technology is replete with capabilities to curtail WAN-refresh pain: pervasive automation; overlay/underlay architectures; segmentation of data, control and management planes; gateways. But it’s still not a walk in the park. Adopting an SD-WAN is a major shift in architecture and operation. Ingredients for success demand technology, features and capabilities—these must meet your cost, functional and technical requirements. Yet it is equally essential for you to do meticulous research into requirements, cross-team collaboration, rigorous vendor evaluation, and to arrive at an unambiguous definition of your minimum viable product—the minimum capabilities you must deploy in the first phase. Nothing more, nothing less. Don’t do everything up front: first the must-haves, and later the would-be-nices.Fiserv has a vast network and traditional architectures no longer make sense in the global digital economy: things like central data centers, branch offices, fixed MPLS links, hub-and-spoke traffic flows, hardware EOS/EOL death marches. Fiserv clients are cloud-hosted, traffic traverses clouds, sometimes the cloud is the transport, network functions are deployed as VNFs where and when they’re needed and scaled appropriately, everything is automated and monitoring and analytics must be at the fingertips.After stringent vendor selection, Fiserv selected Versa Networks as their Secure SD-WAN vendor of choice and has already completed the deployment to a significant degree. Key factors in their vendor choice and rollout success included several items.
- A brownfield approach that allows the old and new networks to co-exist flexibly via overlays and gateways. Fiserv could easily plug the Versa infrastructure into their existing network and immediately interoperate with native BGP and the basic LAN and WAN connectivity they needed. The Versa infrastructure included nothing proprietary requiring pre-existing equipment or applications to be phased out first.
- Versa fully integrates robust security together with all routing and LAN functions in a multiple-VNF architecture that runs on a single CPE [virtual] platform. This removes the need for multiple specialized devices per site. Additionally, it allows secure Internet break-out at all sites without compromising SaaS applications such as Office 360, Zoom, Webex, Collaboration.
- Comprehensive visibility provided by centralized reporting and displaying status and analytics. Users, applications, security, and traffic are all viewed in on a single real-time dashboard. No 3rd party tools or partners required. Versa follows standard reporting, polling and streaming methods allowing easy integration with other systems.
- Minimize operational costs The Versa solution offers a single-stack security and routing software solution based on Linux. This significantly simplifies operational activities such as tracking, bug-scrubbing, troubleshooting and regression testing of Versa software releases.
Watch this informative webinar now. It sparkles with tips and discussion about the Fiserv evaluation and deployment of a Versa Secure SD-WAN—presented by Kelly Ahuja, CEO of Versa Networks, and Michael Wynston, Director of Fiserv. Hosted by ONUG.
