Heavy Networking 583: How Salesforce Evolved Its Branch Network With Prisma SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Salesforce decided it needed a better way to connect remote and branch offices to its corporate headquarters and to cloud applications. The MPLS circuits it used were private but not encrypted, and developers often complained that they got higher bandwidth at home than in the office. Salesforce also wanted to be able to steer traffic at the application level in addition to traditional routing. On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we hear from Salesforce about the evolution of its branch network to SD-WAN with Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN. Our guests are Georgi Stoev, Sr. Network Architect at Salesforce; and Kumar Ramachandran, Senior Vice President at Palo Alto Networks. Georgi shares his experiences rolling out SD-WAN to more than 70 offices around the world, including deployment and operations, as well as internal challenges such as moving away from the CLI to an orchestration model and retraining how network engineers thought about the WAN. After some early hiccups, Georgi says the product’s application identification feature can make fine-grained distinctions, such as between two different Google services. It can also enforce different policies for each service. He also discusses SD-WAN deployment and operations, how the company increased available bandwidth for less money, enjoyed more selection for access in global markets, and cut down dramatically on user complaints. Show Links: Prisma SD-WAN Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN At-a-Glance (Datasheet) – Palo Alto Networks TEI Spotlight Report – Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN – LinkedIn @PrismaSDWAN – Prisma SD-WAN On Twitter