1 A Guide to Secure SD-WAN for Housing Associations Smarter connectivity for staff and tenants 2 85% of organisations are now operating in a multicloud environment. Has your network evolved to keep up?3 Contents Your Housing Association Has Changed ......................................................................... 4 What is Secure SD-WAN? .............................................................................................. 6 The Benefits ................................................................................................................. 8 FAQs ...........................................................................................................................10 Work with the Experts ..................................................................................................12 A Suite of Solutions for All Your Requirements ..............................................................14 Contact Us ..................................................................................................................154 Your Housing Association Has Changed Today your teams are working with a blend of technologies to deliver better services to tenants. They’re using more cloud-based SaaS apps and collaborating using HD videos, instant messaging and file sharing. They’re out in the community, delivering face-to-face services to tenants, while staying connected to their colleagues. Your teams need easy access to data Whether they’re out visiting a tenant or simply trying to access files from the office, your staff need fast, seamless access to business data and SaaS apps. With high demand for your services, downtime is not an option. Staff need to be able to work productively wherever they are, enabling your housing association to deliver tenant services around the clock.5 Did you know? The average time to identify a data breach is 197 days. The average time to contain a breach is 69 days. Performance is important, but so is protection While teams need to be able to access information across your network, they must do so securely. Data breaches can send your housing association spiralling, affecting your services and your relationship with tenants, taking time and money to contain. Secure SD-WAN: delivering on performance and protection Our SD-WAN solution brings agility and security to your network, empowering your teams with the fastest, most secure experience, wherever they are working. While there are various SD-WAN solutions on the market, what makes ours unique is that we’ve put security and data protection at the heart of it. To find out what SD-WAN could do for your housing association, please get in touch. 6 What is Secure SD-WAN? It’s a software-defined approach to managing your wide area networks, where you use centralised consoles to control network application flows, policies, security mechanisms and general administration. Secure SD-WAN continually prioritises traffic flow, so that everybody has an amazing experience, whether they’re on an HD video call with the team or simply accessing files across the network. SD-WAN appliances replace the standard router at each of your locations with a Next Generation Firewall, Anti-Virus, Intrusion Prevention and Application Control appliance. The Next Generation Firewall: This Fortigate appliance is delivered by leading security vendor Fortinet. Fortinet are independently recognised for SD-WAN and security capability. 7 “As our organisation continues to grow, we needed a provider that could grow with us and ensure our digital transformation continued on an upward trajectory. Node4 stood out as an obvious choice for the upgrade due to its flexibility and breadth of capability to drive our digitalisation forward and benefit our users, as well as the reassurance of a future-proof IT infrastructure that we can scale as we go.” Claire Sockett, Head of IT at South Yorkshire Housing Association8 The Benefits Secure SD-WAN brings with it a range of benefits…. Security • Next Generation Firewalls at every location protects all users from internal and external threats. Reduce the risk of users accessing malicious content and control access to websites using a built-in web-filtering solution. • Intrusion Prevention and Anti-Malware at every location actively stops the spread of malicious code throughout your organisation. • Centralised Management allows a single set of security policies and device health standards to be managed in one location for all devices. This standardisation means that every device is kept up to date, the configuration is backed up and has an identical security policy. • Bring Your Own Network functionality means you can bring unmanaged network locations, such as co-working spaces and home offices, under the same security ad application policies as your standard locations. In addition, traffic from these locations is encrypted for maximum security. Improved performance • Application intelligence enables over 3,000 applications to be detected and prioritised on the network automatically, according to your needs. • Optimise your network, by using those ‘Failover’ circuits. Business data can be sent across primary and secondary connections, maximising your investment in the current site connectivity. In the event of line failure, application intelligence will ensure key applications have priority on the remaining line. • Optimise your SaaS apps, without compromising security. Internet traffic for SaaS applications can be used directly from each location, rather than sending all internet traffic through a central pair of security devices. With each location having a Next Generation Security Firewall, you can be sure that business data is protected. 9 More visibility • Analytics and reporting features allow you to see monthly reports on how your network is supporting your team’s productivity. This can help you plan for new applications, technology deployments or simply the connectivity for your next location. You can also review threat dashboards to understand risks within your organisation and review any policy changes. Easy to set up • Zero Touch Provisioning speeds up new site deployments and hardware replacements. We arrange for network appliances to be shipped directly from the vendor to you, and once connected, we push out configurations remotely. • Working with 4G and 5G connectivity, you can get SD-WAN set up in your new location straight away, whilst the fixed line connectivity is being installed. And finally... Expert Support. Secure SD-WAN comes as a Fully Managed Service, brought to you by the same Node4 team who have been delivering Managed Wide Area Networks for over 15 years. Next >