Gartner’s latest Market Guide for SD-WAN observes that the SD-WAN market is maturing and converging towards SASE. With network and security convergence as a dominant trend, Gartner further notes that security capabilities are driving many SD-WAN buying decisions, along with ease-of-use and cloud onramp. Gartner’s perspective suggests organizations focus on security and choose a SD-WAN vendor with a “good-enough” networking solution.
While comprehensive security is critical, the networking nuances of SD-WAN deployments, particularly for large enterprises and campuses, should not be overlooked or minimized. These organizations face unique challenges and require enterprise SD-WAN solutions that combine robust security with best-of-breed networking capabilities to reduce complexity, streamline operations, and reduce total cost of ownership.
Large enterprises and campus environments operate at a scale that introduces unique performance and security challenges, often making operations complex and expensive. They must support massive volumes of SaaS and cloud traffic generated by thousands of users, devices, and applications accessing resources across distributed environments. At the same time, they must manage unknown vulnerabilities introduced by IoT and unmanaged devices, unsanctioned AI tools, and shadow IT.
The rapid adoption of AI, including large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and Agentic AI workloads, adds another layer of complexity. These workloads generate significant bi-directional traffic while expanding the attack surface area.
All these factors contribute to poor user experiences, security gaps, and operational inefficiencies if not properly addressed. Large enterprises therefore need SD-WAN solutions that deliver better WAN availability, secure against both known and unknown vulnerabilities, and reduce network complexity.
These complex; distributed environments demand more than SD-WAN connectivity to SSE. Enterprises require solutions capable of handling demanding performance needs, integrated security, and simplified operations at scale.
Supporting thousands of users and applications across distributed environments requires more than simple connectivity. Enterprises need SD-WAN solutions that maximize all WAN resources including internet, broadband, and private connections to support operations without degrading user experience. They also require application performance optimization capabilities such as built-in WAN optimization, intelligent load balancing, seamless failover, and packet loss recovery.
Critical performance capabilities include:
These features ensure predictable application performance, reduced latency, and high reliability, even in complex, high-traffic environments. In many cases, specialized hardware appliances are necessary to achieve this performance at scale.
Large enterprises are frequent targets for sophisticated cyber threats, while internal risks such as accidental data exposure, unsanctioned applications, and unmanaged IoT devices further expand the attack surface. Everything from connected printers and surveillance cameras to smart TVs can become a potential entry point. If compromised, attackers can attempt lateral movement across the network, creating widespread risk.
To counter this, enterprises need best-in-class security embedded directly into their SD-WAN, with consistent enforcement across users, devices, and applications.
Key enterprise security capabilities include:
By combining integrated security with flexible interoperability, enterprises can safeguard expansive and distributed networks without compromising performance.
Operational efficiency and simplicity depend on unified management. Managing multiple, fragmented solutions across different consoles creates complexity, gaps, and operational risk. Dual-vendor approaches can contribute to problems by splitting visibility across multiple data sources, introducing friction into operations, creating security gaps, and slowing response times. This is especially true in large enterprises where networking and security functions are separated into different teams or departments.
To maximize efficiency, large enterprises need single-console management with granular visibility that integrates networking and security. This provides unified visibility and control while reducing administrative overhead. Unified management must also extend to new traffic patterns, such as AI workloads and logs, to secure enterprise AI adoption.
Since large enterprises take on a wide variety of use cases, enterprise SD-WAN solutions must also accommodate flexibility and a wide variety of deployment options. Management and orchestration need to extend beyond the main campus and headquarters to include LAN or wireless LAN (WLAN) operations, remote users, branches, and cloud deployments. To fully support cloud use cases, the solution also needs to support API and integrate with cloud service providers.
Key requirements for operational simplicity include:
These capabilities simplify day-to-day operations and allow enterprise IT teams to scale effectively with given resources.
Dynamic activities like mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are not uncommon in large enterprises. Such significant transformations require speed from an SD-WAN solution. During these events, organizations must be able to integrate new networks, applications, and users quickly, without downtime or extensive reconfiguration. A full-featured SD-WAN solution provides the scalability and adaptability needed to meet these dynamic requirements.
Versa Secure SD-WAN is built to meet these enterprise requirements within a unified platform. Also available as a standalone solution, Versa SD-WAN provides a direct path to a comprehensive, unified SASE. When combined with Versa Secure Service Edge (SSE), it forms a unified SASE platform that includes advanced capabilities such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) , Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and Secure Web Gateway (SWG). This single-vendor approach eliminates integration gaps, ensures consistent policy enforcement, and simplifies operations across the enterprise.
Check out this short video on why large enterprises choose Versa SD-WAN.
The SD-WAN market may be established, but enterprise requirements continue to evolve. Organizations continue to need unified solutions with full-featured SD-WAN and advanced SSE capabilities with comprehensive networking, robust security, and simplified operations to support modern demands.
Learn more about Versa Secure SD-WAN and SASE.
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