Today’s branch networks are changing. The earlier focus was more on the datacenter as the bulk of the application workloads were hosted in the datacenter. Therefore, all the internal and external traffic was thus dispatched to the centralized data center. As a result, all the main networking gear including security devices were serving the DCs
Fast forward to the present, due to bandwidth limitations on WAN links and emerging SaaS applications, branch networks have undergone significant changes. Physical and virtual devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, WAN optimization and most recently SD-WAN is installed to manage and optimize the data traffic.
As architectural models and business requirements change, IT organizations need to respond to those challenges.