Secure SASE for Architecture Firms

Building smart, sustainable cities and buildings tops the priority list of most governments today. The digital revolution has given rise to endless opportunities for architectural firms to evolve and meet the urbanization demands of today’s mobile and fast-faced generation. New digital technologies have transformed the way architectural projects are perceived, designed, and developed. Now, more than ever, architecture firms are embracing:

  • Cloud-based platforms which are helping architectural firms collaborate from remote locations over VoIP and video calls, operate shared databases, improve business scalability and cost-efficiency.
  • High bandwidth 3D computer-aided design using augmented and virtual reality to bring proposed building structures alive. These 3D designs allow architects, designers, consultants, and contractors to can come together virtually to pick choices and make decisions, saving time, and avoiding costly on-site changes.
  • BIM or Building Information Modeling which helps in collating important design and construction information, stakeholder requirements, and client choices, facilitating better collaboration and coordination in delivering projects quickly.

“87% of architecture professionals agree that digital technologies are transforming the way that they work now.”

Microsoft & RIBA | Digital Transformation in Architecture Report

Legacy Architecture Impedes True Innovation

While technological innovations have brought about extraordinary cost and efficiency benefits, they are also introducing significant management, performance, and security challenges.

Run primarily on bandwidth-limited, expensive MPLS private circuits, legacy WAN networks are falling short of meeting the needs of bandwidth-hungry 3D modeling, visualization, and collaboration tools. As more applications are deployed and new cloud platforms are adopted, the hub-and-spoke architecture with data center backhauling is delaying application access, slowing down performance, and affecting user productivity.

With increased remote access and extensive cloud usage, the risk of cyberattacks is also growing, and legacy WAN network with siloed security systems is incapable of securing design assets and resources hosted on the cloud. Further, the complexity of legacy WAN’s hardware-centric architecture makes network management and new branch deployment an endless struggle, taking as long as three to six months, awfully slowing down time-to-market.


Designing A New Model with SASE

In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can help keep up with technology-enabled, new-age business models, architectural firms are now turning to Secure SD-WAN. The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure is not necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.

Secure SD-WAN makes applications run faster, safer, and more reliably. It delivers consistent and highest quality of experience for all application users irrespective of their location. Secure SD-WAN offers architectural firms the freedom to adopt the application delivery infrastructure that best fits them, without sacrificing performance, security, reliability, or control.


 

 

Always Available Network

Secure SD-WAN offers the ability to aggregate multiple connections of any type, such as MPLS, broadband, wireless 4G, and LTE. By leveraging all available bandwidth, Secure SD-WAN makes the network agile enough to support more traffic volumes, and changing bandwidth demands. Doing so ensures continuous network availability and uninterrupted access to bandwidth-intensive applications hosted on the cloud. Secure SD-WAN’s multiple transport link resilience further helps significantly cut down MPLS driven bandwidth costs.

 

 

High Application Performance

Secure SD-WAN architecture embeds application intelligence, enabling deep packet inspection by the network, beyond its source and destination. It intelligently prioritizes application traffic based on business-intent policies and automatically directs them across the ideal transport route. This helps ensure mission-critical tools and applications are always running smoothly, even during network outages, further improving application reliability and quality of experience. It also enables IT to spend less time dealing with network complexities and have more time and focus applied to business applications and services.

 

 

Centralized Management and Control

With centralized management and control, Secure SD-WAN dramatically simplifies WAN deployment and monitoring. Using simple, template-driven workflows, it eliminates tedious, error-prone configurations. With zero-touch deployment, the IT team can deploy patches, roll out policy updates across all branches from a single central orchestrator in one-go. Secure SD-WAN also offers deep granular visibility into applications, devices, and users to immediately detect and fix anomalies. With a cloud-based Secure SD-WAN, architectural firms can effortlessly manage their complex networks, quickly propagate or integrate new remote branches (in less than a month!), and simply plug-in to instantly connect to cloud services. By eliminating the need for manual visits to each branch site, Secure SD-WAN also helps save substantial operational costs.

 

 

Secure Connectivity

Secure SD-WAN ’s segmentation enables IT to securely consolidate disparate physical environments into a single network. In doing so, they can isolate and prioritize mission-critical traffic from the regular traffic for robust security and better user experience. Additionally, Secure SD-WAN also integrates end-to-end multi-layer security with best-of-breed features such as next-gen firewall, encryption, contextual awareness, and more. These deeper security capabilities allow architectural firms to steer away from data center backhauling of cloud traffic, and instead directly access cloud data and applications, without fearing security risks.