Intelligent bonding and SASE: secure, high-performance connectivity for the public sector

Intelligent bonding and secure access service edge (SASE) can intersect to provide public sector organisations and emergency response units with networking capabilities that are flexible, highly secure, consistent and resilient. As emergency situations unfold and connectivity needs shift rapidly, these technologies adapt to maintain optimised access and performance despite adverse conditions.

What is intelligent bonding?

Intelligent bonding combines multiple WAN links of any type into a single, virtual bonded link to enhance performance and availability. For example, a location could have a 4G LTE connection, a broadband internet connection and a satellite link combined into one bonded link. There are a number of key benefits of link bonding, including:

• Flow duplication: This provides high availability for mission-critical data traffic. It is ideal for cellular routers in vehicles, when roaming between various wireless providers or even between cellular and low-orbit satellite networks.
• Increased bandwidth: Traffic is load balanced across links based on real-time capacity to boost throughput, especially on the upload. Organisations can take advantage of higher aggregated throughput for a specific bandwidth-hungry application, like a file transfer or video upload.
• Increased WAN efficiency and cost control: Traffic is balanced across each WAN connection based on user-defined weights to gain optimal throughput for a variety of diverse applications.

What is SASE?

SASE converges networking and network security into a cloud-native service. It secures and optimises connectivity and access to applications and resources based on identity, not network location. The benefits of SASE include:

• Zero trust access: All access requests are authenticated and authorised based on policy before connectivity is allowed. This stops attacks from spreading laterally if a breach does occur.
• Secure optimised connectivity: Traffic routing and application access policies are integrated with security policies for faster performance and better user experience.
• Consistent operation: Policies automatically follow the user no matter where they connect from — whether the office, home or mobile.
• Seamless failover: If any one link fails, traffic is dynamically shifted to the remaining link(s) with no drop in sessions.

Intelligent bonding and SASE working together

When integrated into a SASE architecture, intelligent bonding can enhance SASE performance and availability. Ambulances, fire trucks, police vehicles and other emergency response units require always-on connectivity for critical voice, video and database access when responding to incidents. Intelligent bonding can bond multiple links — fixed broadband, 4G, 5G, satellite — together to deliver highly resilient wireless connectivity with ample bandwidth for applications. SASE provides consistent, optimised and secured access to applications and resources that sit on top of the bonded links, regardless of where the vehicle is located.

In crisis situations like natural disasters, temporary pop-up healthcare facilities with networking capabilities may need to be established quickly. Intelligent bonding can be used to combine multiple wireless links to these facilities to create a high bandwidth bonded connection that performs well despite adverse conditions. SASE secures this connection into the healthcare network, providing authorised staff with consistent and optimised access to patient healthcare records and applications. Policies automatically follow clinicians securely connecting from either the pop-up facility or their own devices.

In addition to healthcare facilities, when emergency situations occur, temporary incident command centres are often quickly set up near affected locations to coordinate response and recovery activities. Intelligent bonding can rapidly combine 4G/5G and broadband links onsite to deliver fast and resilient connectivity to these temporary emergency operations centres. SASE secures this connectivity and allows seamless access to computing resources and applications in the cloud or primary data centres — allowing the operations centres to have the same connectivity experience as a permanent site.

As public sector organisations increasingly rely on cloud-based applications — as well as mobile workforce enablement, in the case of emergency services — they need WAN connectivity that is secure, performs well and is highly available. Public sector organisations should consider intelligent bonding and SASE — two key technologies that intersect to deliver these capabilities.

Image credit: iStock.com/your_photo