If you had to pick two really hot topics in the networking space right now, you’d be hard-pressed to find two more discussed than SD-WAN and microsegmentation. SD-WAN is the former “king of the hill” in the network engineering. I can remember having more conversations about SD-WAN in the last couple of years than anything else. But as the SD-WAN market has started to consolidate and iterate, a new challenger has arrived. Microsegmentation is the word of the day.

However, I think that SD-WAN and microsegmentation are quickly heading toward a merger of ideas and solutions. There are a lot of commonalities between the two technologies that make a lot of sense running together.

SD-WAN isn’t just about packet switching and routing any longer. That’s because networking people have quickly learned that packet-by-packet processing of traffic is inefficient. All of our older network analysis devices could only see things one IP packet at a time. But the new wave of devices think in terms of flows. They can analyze a stream of packets to figure out what’s going on. And what generates those flows?

Applications.

The key to the new wave of SD-WAN technology isn’t some kind of magic method of nailing up VPNs between branch offices. It’s not about adding new connectivity types. Instead, it’s about application identification. App identification is how SD-WAN does QoS now. The move to using app markers means a more holistic method of treating application traffic properly.

SD-WAN has significant value in application handling. I recently chatted with Kumar Ramachandran of CloudGenix and he echoed that part of the reason why they’ve been seeing growth and recently received a Series C funding round was because of what they’re doing with applications. The battle of MPLS versus broadband has already been fought. The value isn’t going to come from edge boxes unless there is software that can help differentiate the solutions.

Segmenting Your Traffic

So, what does this have to do with microsegmentation? If you’ve been following that market, you already know that the answer is the application. Microsegmentation doesn’t work on a packet-by-packet basis either. It needs to see all the traffic flows from an application to figure out what is needed and what isn’t. Platforms that do this kind of work are big on figuring out which protocols should be talking to which hosts and shutting everything else down to secure that communication.

Microsegmentation is growing in the cloud world for sure. I’ve seen and talked to people from companies like Guardicore, Illumio, ShieldX, and Edgewise in recent months. Each of them has a slightly different approach to doing microsegmentation. But they all look at the same basic approach form the start. The application is the basic building block of their technology.

With the growth of microsegmentation in the cloud market to help ensure traffic flows between hosts and sites is secured, it’s a no-brainer that the next big SD-WAN platform needs to add this functionality to their solution. I say this because it’s not that big of a leap to take the existing SD-WAN application analytics software that optimizes traffic flows over links and change it to restrict traffic flow with policy support.

For SD-WAN vendors, it’s another hedge against the inexorable march of traffic into the cloud. There are only so many Direct Connect analogs that you can build before Amazon decides to put you out of business. But, if you can integrate the security aspect of application analytics into your platform you can make your solution very sticky. Because that functionality is critical to meeting audit goals and ensuring compliance. And you’re going to wish you had it when the auditors come calling.

Tom’s Take

I don’t think the current generation of SD-WAN providers are quite ready to implement microsegmentation in their platforms. But I really wouldn’t be surprised to see it in the next revision of solutions. I also wonder if that means that some of the companies that have already purchased SD-WAN companies are going to look at that functionality. Perhaps it will be VMware building NSX microsegmentaiton on top of VeloCloud. Or maybe Cisco will include some of their microsegmentation from ACI in Viptela. They’re going to need to look at that strongly because once companies that are still on their own figure it out they’re going to be the go-to solution for companies looking to provide a good, secure migration path to the cloud. And all those roads lead to an SD-WAN device with microsegmentation capabilities.