Enterprises continue to move applications to the cloud. Knowledge workers now regularly use Software as-a-Service (SaaS) applications such as Office365, Salesforce and Workday, access email from cloud-hosted services, store documents and backups on Box, Dropbox or the like. ERP and CRM systems are primarily cloud-hosted today. Enterprises increasingly choose Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions for lower costs while increasing IT agility. In fact, IDC estimates that 78% of all workloads will be processed in public or private cloud data centers by 2018*.

Basic SD-WAN solutions also employ an “all-or-nothing” approach to handling internet-bound traffic or must rely on a manual process for configuring Access Control Lists (ACL) on every appliance to identify specific IP addresses to steer trusted SaaS applications directly to the internet.