It’s not news that enterprise organizations
are moving fast to modernize their IT operations so they can improve agility and
sharpen their competitive edge. However, the need for speed and innovation
aren’t limited to the private sector. Federal agencies and state and local
governments are also seeking to update their infrastructures to reduce risk,
automate processes, optimize their data, and improve security and compliance.
Like their private sector counterparts,
federal agency CISOs are increasingly embracing a hybrid
on-premises cloud infrastructure to achieve their transformation. Government
organizations are deploying IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud services to
empower their workforce with collaboration tools, improve decision-making with
real-time insightful AI and analytics, and achieve new levels of efficiency.
VMware SD-WAN™ provides an ideal foundation for agencies seeking to extend their operations to the cloud. However, hybrid cloud environments also introduce distinct security and compliance challenges. How can government agencies tap the potential of cloud while keeping pace with today’s evolving threat landscape?
Unlocking cloud innovation without compromise
By adopting FedRAMP standards, government agencies can ensure that federal data in the cloud is consistently protected, creating a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and monitoring of cloud services. FedRAMP High represents the most advanced level of federal civilian security compliance, incorporating and building on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-53 and other baseline standards, such as Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 140-2, to protect sensitive, unclassified information residing in cloud compute environments.
VMware SD-WAN supports the IT modernization journey for government agencies through combined network and security transformation. It meets the security standards and requirements for continuous monitoring, access control, auditing, security assessment and authorization, contingency planning, secure SDLC, and incident response.
Ensuring security and consistency for cloud services
To address demanding FedRAMP requirements, SD-WAN scales security across all of its cloud service offerings by building an underlying common services platform. Designed to ensure security and consistency across cloud services, it streamlines security control implementations, regardless of the type of service offering. The centralized common services platform supports capabilities like identity and access management for VMware administrators, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, security and event monitoring, logging, and more. Its strong on-premises or cloud-based security enables organizations to accelerate their transition to VMware SASE where and when it’s needed, as part of their digital transformation journey.
With
VMware SD-WAN, cloud providers can focus on developing more innovative service
offerings, while knowing that the backend security implementations will be
handled in a centralized format via this common services platform.
The solution lets
government organizations leverage all the efficiencies of cloud, while making
sure that all their sensitive information is secure. It provides a simple cloud onramp with unified policy for
cloud services (IaaS integrations), enhanced application experience with SaaS
optimization, and cloud-agnostic secure branch connectivity. They can also take
advantage of a gateway-based architecture that’s globally hosted, to provide a
quick on-ramp to the cloud from any location.
SD-WAN
lets IT organizations move beyond their legacy VPN architectures that lack the
security required for today’s cloud environments and are difficult to scale. Designed
for today’s increasingly sophisticated cyber-threats, the VMware SD-WAN
solution delivers a zero-trust network approach with
multi-level authentication to provide a hybrid work infrastructure for
employees, regardless of their location.
The
VMware SD-WAN solution also provides powerful automation capabilities that
enable IT to accelerate workflow processes, deliver services faster, and free
up staff. Zero touch deployment makes it easy for IT to deploy new locations
and add new users.
From
an ongoing support perspective, the solution provides single pane of glass
visibility, together with integrated AIOps, to provide proactive, self-healing,
and remediation for the different elements that connect through their LAN
across the network. For example, security and trust are critical for IoT use
cases, and a breach could undercut the integrity of data and open the door to
vulnerabilities across an agency’s network. Additionally, VMware
SD-WAN Orchestrator delivers centralized management, business-level visibility,
and application usage monitoring across multiple transports, service providers,
and remote sites.
VMware
SD-WAN is also tremendously agile, enabling IT teams to quickly identify
potential issues with IoT sensors
or devices, and rapidly troubleshoot issues, before they can impact network
performance or security.
Securing the full government ecosystem
As the threat landscape evolves, VMware is
continuing to build on and enhance its SD-WAN and cloud security solution to
power a comprehensive SASE
journey. Plans are underway to continue to harden these solutions and support
even more demanding security requirements, such as U.S. Department of Defense Impact
Level 5. As innovation continues, VMware is applying features and best
practices from its government cloud offering to its commercial solutions,
making them even more secure.
Learn more
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