Cloud applications were designed to provide a seamless user experience and greater productivity while making businesses more flexible and agile. No wonder Forbes predicts that 80 percent of workloads will be in the cloud by 2020! But realizing cloud benefits requires a shift away from legacy network and security strategies to secure, direct-to-cloud connections.
Over the last few months, we’ve run a series of blogs with tips for securely routing traffic locally from your branch offices to enable direct access to the internet and cloud applications. We believe the ideal solution should meet five key requirements to deliver comprehensive protection, reduced costs, simpler IT, and a fast user experience for all branch users.
The five key requirements for branch transformation:
- Comprehensive security platform
For identical protection across all locations, you need an integrated platform that inspects all ports and protocols, and delivers the entire security stack—sandbox, firewall, advanced threat protection, data loss prevention, and IPS—as a cloud-based service. And, your security needs to follow users wherever they connect.
- Proxy-based architecture
The percentage of SSL-encrypted traffic is on the rise and so are threats hiding within that traffic. The ability to inspect all SSL traffic is essential, but it’s also a big undertaking. requiring a proxy that natively inspects SSL-encrypted traffic, at scale, without degrading performance.
- Global cloud
The network perimeter has essentially vanished. You need to provide users with consistent access and security from wherever they connect. That requires data centers and egress points close to branch users in all geographies, directly peered with your critical applications.
- Enterprise-grade visibility and policy management
You shouldn’t have to piece together fragmented logs or use separate subscriptions or management platforms to get real-time policy deployment and visibility by user, application, and location.
- Elastic scalability
Optimizing cloud applications depends upon consistent performance and security, regardless of traffic volume. To support your bandwidth-hungry applications and handle traffic increases—without added costs or complexity—you need a multi-tenant security platform that scales elastically.
Making the move to the cloud
As you plan your move to the cloud, keep in mind the five key requirements for branch transformation. By selecting a solution that was designed and built to securely route your branch traffic direct-to-cloud, you can reduce costs, enable a better user experience, and provide identical enterprise protections across all your locations. Learn more about the five key requirements for transforming your network and security by reading, “The Definitive Guide to Branch Transformation.”
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Jen Toscano is Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Zscaler.
