As our businesses changed with the pandemic, the need for the Internet in remote locations, cloud computing, and security all increased and continues to do so. Among other companies, Cradlepoint was able to assist greatly in these areas. At this time, their company believes that wide area network (WAN) architectures have proven too limited. They’re also too inflexible for securely connecting distributed enterprise sites, vehicles, remote employees and devices.
5G is also quite a big factor here that will assist in evolving the industry standards. Cellular is becoming more essential as an alternative or backup WAN so it is important that it can easily be managed and secured.
As a response, Cradlepoint has released a new version of NetCloud that is designed to address common issues and help “lean IT organizations” amplify their 5G experience. This will assist with advanced SD-WAN, zero-trust capabilities, and security services.
“As organizations continue to undergo digital transformation, IT teams must evolve how they manage the network edge,” said Rohit Mehra, group vice-president of network and telecom infrastructure at leading analyst IDC. “Cradlepoint’s innovation in wireless WAN is enabling enterprises to deploy 5G with the management and security functions needed to scale.”
The new software, called NetCloud Exchange, is based on what is called an agile LTE/5G VPN-like service. More importantly, it’s been designed to enable secure end-to-end connections for thousands of locations in just three steps. Zero-trust principles include IP address cloaking and no default network access to change the traditional VPN paradigm from “connect and then secure”, to “secure and then connect” to provide least privileged-based access.
Advanced SD-WAN features are of course an extension of Cradlepoint’s current SD-WAN capabilities. The advancement is that they have added end-to-end support and advanced application optimization. This adds features such as 5G network slicing, simplified configuration at scale, more advanced cloud integration, more resilient and flexible traffic steering, and more scalable and resilient private and cloud data center terminations.
Zero-trust network access consists of a service that is simple to deploy and uses flexible, granular user, site, application and resource-based policies that use identity, context and 5G attributes to control network access.
All services are delivered using the NetCloud Exchange Service Gateway offering for private and cloud data centers, which aggregates remote connections, provides flow-level visibility and acts as the policy-enforcement point for the services it supports.
Cradlepoint’s EMEA product manager said, “Most network solutions today are designed for wired-only deployments. With the new NetCloud Exchange extension, NetCloud now offers new 5G and security-first services to support enterprise WAN transformation, including end-to-end secure connectivity, hybrid SD-WAN and zero-trust networking – all lifecycle-managed through a single pane of glass.”