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AUGUST 2025

Guide to Optimizing Secure SD-WAN Performance for

Hyperconnected Networks in the Age of AI

Jim Frey, Principal Analyst

Abstract: This guide examines the challenges and ideal approaches for optimizing secure SD-WAN performance

in today’s distributed, hybrid, multi-cloud business environment. With organizations typically using multiple cloud

providers and data centers, network connectivity has become increasingly critical, especially with the rise of AI

deployments across the enterprise. Modern solutions must deliver high performance, high security, flexibility,

resilience, simplicity, and cost-efficiency. Check Point’s Quantum SD-WAN offers a comprehensive approach to

addressing these demands.

The Current Environment

The new normal for most IT infrastructure is hybrid and multi-cloud (see Figure 1). Enterprise Strategy Group research

found that the average enterprise organization is using at least three public cloud providers, at least two colocation

providers, and at least two private data centers.1 This means that complexity is high, and the need to provide effective,

high-performing, and highly reliable network connectivity between distributed locations has never been more critical.

Further, one of the greatest new technology waves of the past two decades—applying AI across all facets of business

and IT—is having a clear impact on planning and decision-making, as AI tools demand higher throughput and low-

latency connectivity whether consumed from the cloud or from an on-premises data center. Ninety percent of IT

decision-makers believed that networks are becoming more critical to their organizations due to AI deployments. A

similarly large percentage, 85%, said they are seeing AI’s noticeable impact not only on network planning, but also

on development/engineering efforts and ongoing IT operations.2 AI technology is also a growing factor as part of edge

computing, such as retail store analytics and industrial IoT.

Throughout all of this, there has been no relief from the ongoing imperative for high-quality end-user and employee

experience across all business-critical applications and services. This applies to locally hosted, cloud-based, or SaaS

applications as well as interactive voice and video conferencing. All must be accessible and performant from wherever

users might be connecting, be it traditional offices, home offices, remote sites, or from the road.

1 Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Brief, Modern Business is Multi-cloud by Design, November 2024. 2 Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Architecting the Network for an AI-powered World, February 2025.

S H O W C A S E

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Showcase: Guide to Optimizing Secure SD-WAN Performance for Hyperconnected Networks

in the Age of AI

What Is Needed

Meeting today’s demands requires designing and deploying a WAN that can connect users and applications across

hybrid infrastructures and deliver consistently excellent experiences. To meet that need, WAN approaches need to

deliver high performance, high security, flexibility, resilience, operational simplicity, and cost-efficiency. Following are

deeper details on each of these requirement dimensions:

• High performance means fully accommodating the network proficiency requirements that underpin excellent digital experiences for users, such as adequate bandwidth and latency. This is best accomplished by prioritizing network performance according to the individual needs or business importance of each application and service.

• High security requires leveraging best-in-class security capabilities, such as modern zero-trust security service edge and secure access service edge (SASE) architectures, ideally in a manner that is tightly integrated with network features and controls, to reduce operational complexity. Even better, a complete security stack should be tightly integrated, whether from a single vendor or multiple vendors, to provide advanced threat prevention, data protection and zero-trust access control to target resources.

• Flexibility involves ensuring an ability to cover all potential types of locations that require connectivity, including cloud, campus, branch, home office, and mobile. Consequently, this requires support for multiple types of connections and mixed network characteristics, from traditional corporate business networking services such as Multiprotocol Label Switching to local broadband internet and cellular wireless such as 4G LTE and 5G. Also important here is the ability to gracefully scale up or down, to meet the spectrum of needs from small businesses all the way up to large global enterprises.

• Resilience means delivering continuous connectivity and network service quality, ensuring the absolute minimum in potential downtimes or degradations. This commonly requires use of multiple concurrent connections, with active load balancing, along with re-balancing to protect high priority applications if any failure occurs. The method used to ensure resilience can vary widely by organization. While one enterprise may have ten ISP links connected to a single data center, highly distributed and smaller organizations may opt for 5G or even non-terrestrial (satellite-based) connections.

Figure 1. Hybrid, Multi-cloud Is the New Normal

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

5%

31% 30%

21%

11%

1%6%

25%

31%

28%

8% 2%2%

16%

35%

30%

15%

2%

0 1 2 3 to 5 6 or more Don’t know

Please identify the number of application deployment locations currently in use by your organization. (Percent of respondents, N=366)

On-premises data center Colocation provider Public cloud provider

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Showcase: Guide to Optimizing Secure SD-WAN Performance for Hyperconnected Networks

in the Age of AI

• Simplicity can be a significant challenge. The goal here is to find a feature-rich and broadly capable solution that does not bring with it a steep learning curve and difficult administration and operations. An ideal approach will ease deployment, configuration, tuning, and operational tasks, with particular preference given to solutions that can cover multiple needs on an integrated basis, including automated actions to address and mitigate common issues and incidents.

• Cost-efficiency encompasses a range of financial considerations spanning solution licensing and acquisition, deployment services required, and resource intensity for ongoing operations. These elements will determine solution ROI and, ultimately, value to the business.

Check Point Quantum SD-WAN: An Integrated Network and Security Solution

Check Point is well known for its solutions spanning hybrid mesh network security and workspace security. The Quantum line focuses on network security, including high-efficacy, next-generation firewalls with advanced threat prevention in its Quantum Security Gateways. In fact, according to Check Point, its Quantum gateways have a 99.9% block rate.3 The Harmony line of solutions provides remote and hybrid work security, with a security service edge delivered by Harmony SASE, and CloudGuard Network provides cloud-native firewalls. All firewall form factors deliver the same, consistent security stack across cloud, on-prem, and remote environments.

To provide secure connectivity to modern distributed environments, Check Point offers Quantum SD-WAN, a software blade embedded in Quantum and Quantum Spark gateways. Details of this solution include:

• Converged security and networking

o Fully integrated Harmony SASE offering that leverages unified cloud-based delivery of secure internet access, zero-trust access, anti-malware, anti-phishing, web and DNS filtering, browser security, and more.

o Single vendor, fully converged security and network optimization in a single appliance, so organizations can take advantage of existing Check Point Quantum security gateways to easily deploy SD-WAN with no additional hardware required.

o Integrated support for Infinity Playblocks and automation features for connections with external systems— more than 100 existing integrations with toolkits for adding more as needed.

o Automated, proactive policy auditing with AI Policy Auditor for tighter zero-trust management and proactive infrastructure health monitoring with AIOps.

o Threat exposure and risk management to handle lifecycle of internal and external threats, including automated remediation of threat exposures across the multivendor security stack and quantified external risk reduction through takedown services of phishing, brand impersonation, and more.

• Optimized connectivity and accelerated time to value

o Immediate performance optimization with Check Point’s first-packet application detection engine and out-of- the-box steering policies ensures that organizations can rapidly improve connectivity upon installation.

o The application detection engine automatically identifies more than 10,000 different apps to simplify granular policy creation for application- and user-based policies. This saves organizations the significant amount of time it would take to identify and manually add applications to create individual policies for them. The engine also includes autonomous steering policies out of the box (e.g., prioritizing remote help desk support over other business applications), based on the latency sensitivity of an application.

o Dynamic path selection technology based on link health—as determined by jitter, packet loss, and latency data—enhances the optimization capabilities.

o Sub-second failover to secondary and tertiary links, which ensures uninterrupted experiences for latency- sensitive applications such as web conferencing (Zoom, etc.) and VoIP.

3 Source: Enterprise & Hybrid Mesh Firewall Security Report (2025), Checkpoint.com, 2025.

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Showcase: Guide to Optimizing Secure SD-WAN Performance for Hyperconnected Networks

in the Age of AI

• Unified management with advanced provisioning and monitoring

o Unified cloud-based management for both SD-WAN and on-premises security appliances/gateways, which become especially important for ensuring operational efficiency and consistent policy management across large, distributed network footprints.

o Zero-touch SD-WAN provisioning in Quantum and Quantum Spark gateways, activated from the Check Point Infinity Portal.

o Check Point cloud-based SD-WAN management includes:

▪ Dashboards for recognizing real-time network health per branch across all links, including service- level agreement metrics.

▪ Advanced management, monitoring, and analytics that serve for rapid troubleshooting and debugging, including visibility into both underlay and overlay network constructs.

▪ Single pane logging for all security products and events.

o AI Copilot assistant for more effective network and security administration, available for both Quantum Security Management and Harmony SASE.

• Flexible solutions for any size or type of organization

o Check Point has integrated SD-WAN capabilities as a software subscription across its entire gateway portfolio: small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprise, data center, open server, and cloud. It offers a range of secure SD-WAN solutions, including an all-in-one enterprise solution (Quantum SD-WAN embedded into Quantum Gateways), all-in-one solutions tailored for SMBs and the managed service providers that manage their networks (Quantum Spark), and integration with cloud-based security solutions including Harmony SASE and CloudGuard Network, which are all managed from the Infinity Portal, as well as integration with third-party SSE solutions such as Microsoft Entra and Zscaler.

o Its cloud-native firewall (CloudGuard Network) can also be connected to on-premises SD-WAN (embedded within Quantum Gateways) for organizations who prefer a cloud deployment model.

o Check Point solutions provide the ability to scale to support configurations ranging from a small branch office to large data center environments (from 750 Mbps to 3,000 Gbps) and anything in between.

o Integrated Wi-Fi, router, switch, and 5G (Quantum Spark) offers support for all-in-one branch and SMB appliances.

o Check Point supports industrial use cases with ruggedized appliances that offer embedded wireless support (Quantum Rugged).

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Showcase: Guide to Optimizing Secure SD-WAN Performance for Hyperconnected Networks

in the Age of AI

Figure 2. Quantum SD-WAN With Tightly Integrated Security

Source: Check Point Software

As shown in Figure 2, the Check Point Quantum SD-WAN solution enables fully embedded and integrated security

that leverages a vast array of gateway appliances covering branches and ruggedized appliances for industrial

needs, as well as on-premises data centers, cloud data centers (IaaS), and enterprise locations.

Conclusion

Enterprise network complexity is not abating, in fact quite the opposite, and criticality of networks has never been

higher, demanding uninterrupted, non-stop connectivity from site-to-site, site-to-cloud, and internet-based WAN

connectivity. Finding effective approaches to reliable, high performance, and highly secure WAN is an essential

aspect of building and protecting today’s network architectures. Networking and security teams should seek

solutions that deliver effective SD-WAN features, combined with a complete security stack, whether delivered on-

premises or via SASE, and are simple, flexible, and cost-effective. The Quantum SD-WAN solution from Check

Point Software offers precisely this type of approach.

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