The most significant IT transformation of this century is the rapid adoption of cloud-based applications. Most organizations are now dependent on a number of SaaS and IaaS platforms to deliver customer satisfaction and empower employee productivity. IT teams are responsible for delivering a high quality user experience for cloud applications while they struggle to manage a secure environment with advanced persistent threats. The WAN is the fabric to connect and control access between remote users and cloud-based applications.
The WAN fabric needs to identify application type, location, apply prioritization and route traffic across the appropriate (multiple) WAN links to deliver on user experience. Different types of users/devices connecting to the cloud (via the Internet) means security policies must be enforced at branch, data center and in the cloud.