Secure SASE for Transportation
Transportation and logistics organizations are tapping into the advantages of new digital technologies to streamline operations and drive profitability. Typically, transportation and logistics organizations such as aviation, freight forwarding, railways, ports, and shipping are widely distributed in nature, operating across different countries and continents.
Digital transformation is enabling these organizations with speed, consistency, and predictability that are crucial to running such large-scale network operations efficiently and thriving in the competitive tech-driven market.
“Customer expectations, technology changes, market dynamics, new entrants, and trade flows are the main disruptors influencing the future of the transportation and logistics industry.”
PWC STRATEGIC INSIGHTS
Legacy Components and Systems are No Longer Sufficient
Transportation and logistics organizations are stepping beyond the regular RFID and GPS tracking systems. They are now investing in game-changing technologies such as automation, IoT, AI, Big Data, digital twin technologies, and robotics to build efficient, sustainable, and environment-friendly businesses.
Transportation organizations need to adopt:
- Cloud services that help enable scalable and efficient “platform-based business” models, thus yielding better profits and radically improving customer experience
- AI and ML-based algorithms offering real-time updates and predictive analysis derived out of consolidating information on changing traffic patterns, weather conditions, good’s movement, etc. to arrive at accurate ETAs and make smart decisions.
- IoT together with advanced analytics to offer improved visibility and greater control over inventory management and warehouse operations
- Automation to help improve cost-efficiency by eliminating the need for too many physical resources in everyday warehouse operations such as sorting and distribution
- 5G supported network to enable self-driving fleets and electric trucks that support an organizations’ efforts to cut down carbon emissions and foster sustainability
Reducing Management, Performance, and Security Challenges
Promising new technologies are undoubtedly offering endless possibilities for the transportation and logistics sector. Nevertheless, they are also introducing significant management, performance, and security challenges due to the lack of a supporting network infrastructure. Managing complex and geographically spread out operations of the transportation and logistics industries requires a secure, scalable, agile, and high-performing network infrastructure. On the contrary, legacy WAN inefficiencies are growing by the day, unable to keep up with changing demands, creating huge bottlenecks in service delivery.
Cloud applications and remote access have substantially increased traffic flow, constantly demanding more bandwidth. Legacy WAN running primarily on expensive, bandwidth-limited MPLS lines is unable to support increased bandwidth demands, leading to frequent network outages and latency issues halting mission-critical operations.
The hub-and-spoke architecture is further leading to operational delays by backhauling traffic to the data centers. One of the major pitfalls of the Legacy WAN network is the poor visibility it offers into system operations. Visibility is key to avoiding mismanagement and maintaining rigorous regulatory compliance, especially in the widely distributed transportation and logistics sector. 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.
As exciting as the new technologies are, they also present massive security risks. IoT sensors extensively used in delivery vehicles and other AI-based technologies are leaving security gaps that can lead to unthinkable security breaches and financial losses.
Secure Point A to B with SASE
In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can constantly support increased traffic volume, improve real-time communication, secure cloud connectivity, reduce operational costs, and catalyze digital growth, transport and logistics organizations 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.
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. In doing so, it ensures continuous network availability and uninterrupted access to bandwidth-intensive AI and AR applications. Secure SD-WAN’s multiple transport link resilience also 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 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 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, IT can deploy patches, roll out policy updates, and strictly adhere to regulatory mandates across all branch locations 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 any anomalies. With a cloud-based Secure SD-WAN, transport and logistics organizations can 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 saves 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 classify applications based on business-intent and isolate confidential data traffic from the regular corporate traffic for higher security and better regulatory compliance. 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 transport and logistics organizations to steer away from data center backhauling of cloud traffic, and instead directly access cloud data and applications, without fearing security risks.