- [Presenter] Say, we now have a WAN connection.
What's next?
Well, the next step is for us to think
of how to secure and optimize our WAN connection.
Let us start with WAN security.
For site-to-site connections, and even for remote access,
one of the most common ways to secure the WAN traffic
is by using VPN, or that is the virtual private network.
Think of it like having a virtual tunnel between your sites.
All traffic between the sites
will then pass through the virtual tunnel,
hence, a virtual private network.
You can also add encryption
and authentication to a VPN connection
so as to keep your data more secure.
However, with added security measures,
it will add overhead to the network traffic as well.
That is why sometimes, not always,
you may notice that the network connection
can be a bit slower when using a VPN.
For that matter,
it is important to also compare
and assess which is the right VPN solution for you.
Now, aside from VPNs, you also need to check the security
of your network devices.
For small office, home office networks,
check your modem router.
In terms of physical security,
where is the modem router located?
Who can access it?
Is it kept in a secure place?
All right, let us now think of logical security.
Are you still using the default username
and password for the device?
Hopefully not.
Now, think of the CIA triad.
Confidentiality.
What encryption and authentication measures are in place?
Integrity.
Do you use hashing or digital certificates?
How about in terms of availability?
Do you have a backup?
That's in terms of backup device, backup of your config,
and backup power as well,
like UPS or uninterruptible power supply
'cause they're all important, you know?
Also check if your device has other security features
like firewall, content filtering, MAC address filtering,
or VPN perhaps that you can use.
For business and enterprises,
aside from your security appliances,
you also need to ensure that policies
and procedures are in place for your organization,
like policies for remote access and internet use.
Also, think of policies for incident handling and reporting,
plus guidelines for communicating
with your partnered vendors and service provider.
All right, say you've now secured your network.
How can we optimize it?
I mean, we've got lots
of network traffic going through, right?
How can we manage it in such a way
that the important network traffic,
like work-related data transfer,
is not affected by music streaming, for example?
Well, there are various techniques that we can use.
First that we can employ is traffic shaping.
It is a QoS or a quality of service technique
where we can prioritize network traffic,
either based on IP address or the application
or the protocol.
Say we would like to prioritize VoIP traffic
followed by data transfers and the list priority is email.
Can we do that?
Yeah.
In that way, the VoIP traffic will be prioritized
and will not be affected
by when there's too much dotted traffic,
just in our example.
Nice, right?
Meanwhile, please be aware that in some SOHO routers
as well as in some other network devices,
you might see this capability marked
or named as QoS instead of traffic shaping.
Just letting you know so that you are aware.
As for the WAN connections in between sides,
we can streamline the network traffic
through any of the following or combination thereof.
We've got data compression, deduplication, local caching,
and protocol optimization.
Let us talk about each of them,
starting with data compression.
This technique uses compression algorithms
such as ZIP or RAR,
so as reduce the size of the data
before sending it over the WAN network.
Next, we have deduplication.
As the name implies, with deduplication,
it avoids sending the same traffic across the WAN.
In case of having redundant data,
it sends references instead rather than the actual data.
Next, we got local caching or proxy.
Say we got a file
that we keep on accessing over and over again.
Ain't it better if we simply have that file stored locally?
That is caching.
DNS and HTTP are just a couple of examples
that use this technique.
Finally, we got protocol optimization.
Think of it as doing some technical tweaks
to the network traffic,
like adjusting the transmitting window size
or by being selective on which packets to acknowledge,
or by optimizing the congestion window size.
Told you, it's technical, right?
The important thing to remember
is that with protocol optimization,
we are able to mitigate the effects
of latency over long distances,
hence, be able to improve the application response times.
Great!
We have just covered a few of the things
that you can take so as to secure
and optimize your WAN connection.
It's your turn now to apply these measures
to your own network.