Bridgeworks CEO and CTO, David Trossell features in Network Computing+ to discuss how to successfully overlay SD-WAN and WAN Acceleration.
May 2025
With advancements in AI/ML, cybersecurity threats are becoming increasingly complex and persistent.
Jane Frankland, CEO of KnewStart, writes in her ‘Key Cybersecurity Trends for 2025. My Predictions’ blog that “an attacker could map a country’s power grid vulnerabilities without triggering any alarms, setting the stage for future, large-scale operations.”
She also predicts that cyber-crime will cost $12 trillion in 2025. Ransomware remains the main threat, but how it’s unleashed is evolving. “Additionally, the use of customisable ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) platforms is now mainstream, enabling even novice threat actors to launch professional-level attacks. With 24% of all data breaches using ransomware, this commoditisation of cybercrime significantly broadens the field, resulting in a sharp increase in the frequency and variety of attacks,” adds Frankland. To obfuscate cyber-criminals, greater investment in cyber-security is needed.
Times-are-a-changing
Traditionally, the answer to securely transmitting data, backing it up and restoring it, has been WAN Optimisation, which, unfortunately, often doesn’t live up to its promise. For example, it can’t transmit and receive encrypted data.
Next in line are SD-WANs – a great technology – but they often could do with a WAN Acceleration boost. There’s also Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), which often incorporates SD-WANs and security functionalities to securely connect users and resources regardless of location.
Gartner finds that SASE is rapidly gaining in popularity – predicting that the market for SASE will reach over $25 billion by 2027. It is also thought that in 2024, 40% of enterprises will have explicit strategies to adopt it. SASE adoption is expected to continue to grow in 2025, as it’s widely thought that many enterprises are planning to implement it, or they are already doing so.
This upsurge is driven by a requirement need for secure, efficient access to cloud applications and resources in hybrid environments. Still, SD-WANs – next to WAN Optimisation – are still more popular. Yet, SASE – perhaps because it also includes SDWANs – is expected to take the lead. Yet, they often don’t adequately deal with the network Gremlins of latency and packet loss.
Creating synergy
Nevertheless, WAN Acceleration with technologies offer synergy with SD-WANs. With AI, ML and data parallelisation, WAN Acceleration mitigates latency and packet loss, while enabling organisations to utilise 98% of their network’s bandwidth without having to invest in new network infrastructure.
When overlayed onto SD-WANs, it provides a boost in network performance, including for backups and restores to ensure regulatory compliance and to maintain service continuity in the face of cyber-attacks. Not only does WAN Acceleration help to protect data in flight and create a robust and future-proof network infrastructure, it can be used to improve the performance and security of cloud-based applications, which are often impacted by latency and packet loss. A slow network connection can render cloud applications useless, and an insecure connection can create data security risks.
SD-WANs and WAN Acceleration therefore complement each other with SD-WANs, providing intelligent routing and traffic management. Meanwhile, WAN Acceleration
enhances data transfer speeds, data security in flight and efficiency by mitigating latency and packet loss. To achieve this ideal partnership, WAN Acceleration must be overlayed onto SD-WANs.
Backing up and restoring data
SD-WANs and WAN Acceleration together offer a means to improve the performance of backing up and restoring data, as well as of cloud-based applications – helping organisations to achieve and maintain compliance with regulatory frameworks, such as HIPPA and GDPR. However, they are just part of the cybersecurity solution because organisations should always locate their data centres and disaster recovery sites outside of their own circles of disruption, and back up data in at least three separate locations.
The problem is that distance often increases latency, and there aren’t alternative solutions on the market today that can mitigate latency as well as WAN Acceleration, which is not WAN Optimisation – despite the claims. It renders concerns about distance obsolete, and it enhances SD-WANs. However, due to the physics of latency, it can only be mitigated, not eliminated completely. Yet, they go a long way to reduce its impact.
Enterprises should therefore explore adopting an SD-WAN-WAN Acceleration overlay strategy as part of their bid to obfuscate cyber-criminals, and to improve their ability to back up and restore data to maintain operations when disaster strikes – not mention the benefits of better cloud application performance, more accurate big data analysis, and team collaboration.
Click here to read the article on Networking Plus+ Magazine.
