Beyond the SSE Plus SD-WAN Checklist
SASE has often been defined simply as SSE plus SD-WAN. But that framing misses what actually matters: the architecture underneath. A checklist of security services and traffic on-ramps means little if traffic is still traversing a fragmented network. Many organizations end up with multiple vendors just to cover their needs, accepting performance and security tradeoffs along the way.
Single-vendor SASE aims to fix that by converging networking and security. Yet for it to deliver on the promise of any-to-any connectivity, the network itself needs modernizing. Cloudflare has been building toward this with Cloudflare One, and the latest updates focus on making SASE networking more flexible for security teams, more efficient for networking teams, and—newly—more relevant for DevOps.
The platform updates announced today span three areas:
- Flexible site-to-site on-ramps that support both agent/proxy-based and appliance/routing-based implementations.
- WAN-as-a-service (WANaaS) capabilities such as high availability, application awareness, a virtual machine deployment option, and deeper visibility and analytics.
- Zero Trust connectivity for DevOps, with mesh and peer-to-peer (P2P) secure networking that extends ZTNA to service-to-service workflows and bidirectional traffic.
Cloudflare offers a broad set of SASE on- and off-ramps—for WANs, applications, services, systems, devices, and other internal resources—so organizations can choose the connectivity paradigm that fits their environment, technical familiarity, and team responsibilities. The Magic WAN Connector was covered in a separate post, and the full reference architecture, including the new WARP Connector, is documented in Cloudflare's SASE architecture guide.
Security teams get an easier path to connectivity
SASE adoption often collides with internal silos. Security, IT, and networking teams own different technologies with misaligned replacement cycles, and that friction can stall projects. Security teams need to protect resources wherever they live, but when a small connectivity change would help, it’s often outside their control. They don’t want to depend on the networking team for every subnet connection—nor do they want to break existing network infrastructure in the process.
Agent/proxy-based site-to-site connectivity
To address that, Cloudflare now supports both agent/proxy-based and appliance/routing-based implementations for site-to-site and subnet-to-subnet connectivity. Networking teams can stick with familiar routing concepts using appliance/routing-based WANaaS—a modern alternative to legacy SD-WAN overlays. Security and IT teams, meanwhile, can achieve the same connectivity through agent/proxy-based software connectors like the WARP Connector, which are more approachable to deploy.
This agent-based approach blends what have traditionally been separate categories: branch connectors and app connectors. It brings WAN and ZTNA technology closer together, supporting least-privileged access across the board. Agent/proxy-based connectivity may be a good fit for a subset of an organization's connections—microsites without a router or firewall, or environments where IPsec or GRE tunnels can't be configured, such as tightly regulated managed networks or Kubernetes clusters. All on-ramp options can be used concurrently and composably.
The same underlying technology that helps security teams replace VPNs also supports ZTNA for apps requiring server-initiated or bidirectional traffic. That includes VoIP and SIP traffic, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), Active Directory domain replication, and—as covered below—DevOps workflows.
This on-ramp acts as a router for a subnet within the private network, enabling site-to-site, bidirectional, and mesh connectivity without requiring any changes to the underlying routing infrastructure.
Network modernization beyond the WAN edge
For networking teams still anchored to MPLS or first-generation SD-WAN, the practical barriers to a full Internet-based WAN remain stubborn. MPLS is pricey and rigid, but its reliability and quality-of-service features are proven. Broadband is broadly available and often inexpensive, yet it cannot match MPLS on uptime or predictability. That gap matters because for most businesses, network disruption is not an acceptable tradeoff — even when traffic has already largely shifted to the Internet.
SD-WAN was supposed to bridge that divide. It is transport-neutral and improves on plain broadband stability, but it brings its own complications: branch-to-branch traffic often bypasses security inspection, scaling is implementation-specific, and a managed middle mile is frequently absent. The result is that many organizations still cannot make the full cutover away from MPLS, and the limitations of SD-WAN only become fully apparent after purchase.
A "light branch, heavy cloud" WAN
Cloudflare's Magic WAN takes a different route, built natively in the Cloudflare connectivity cloud rather than assembled from acquisitions. Its "light branch, heavy cloud" model aims to augment and ultimately replace MPLS circuits and SD-WAN overlays with cloud-native routing and configuration that is simpler to deploy and consume. Security is embedded rather than bolted on.
Solocal, a Cloudflare customer, reports that a centralized, automated management plane for network and security infrastructure was a decisive factor. The company's network operations manager estimates that consolidating on a single-vendor architecture could cut costs tied to acquiring, installing, maintaining, and upgrading branch appliances by up to 40%.
This contrasts with single-vendor SASE offerings that stitch together products built on different design philosophies. Those fragmented architectures often fail to deliver a converged experience, leaving customers to manage complexity as if they still had multiple vendors. A platform built as one unified system avoids the integration gaps and bypassed security checkpoints that come with assembled solutions.
Magic WAN connects to Cloudflare in several ways: automatically via the Connector device, manually via Anycast IPsec or GRE tunnels initiated on existing edge routers or firewalls, or through Cloudflare Network Interconnect at private peering locations and public cloud instances. The intent is to converge security and networking functionality rather than merely claim integration with SSE.
Expanding the Magic WAN Connector
The Magic WAN Connector, generally available since October 2023, is a lightweight device that drops into existing environments for zero-touch connectivity to Cloudflare One, with the goal of replacing legacy SD-WAN devices, routers, and firewalls. Recent additions to the Connector address common enterprise requirements:
- High Availability (HA) configurations: A pair of Connectors, running as VMs or on supported hardware, work together to resume operation seamlessly if one fails. HA configuration is managed, like everything else, from the Cloudflare One dashboard.
- Application awareness: Traffic policies can be built on application categories in addition to IP and port ranges, using the same classification engine shared with Secure Web Gateway. This ensures consistent behavior across routing and inspection decisions.
- Virtual machine deployment: The Connector is now offered as a downloadable virtual appliance image for any supported hypervisor, with the same low-touch deployment and centralized fleet management as the hardware version. It is available to all Magic WAN customers at no extra cost.
- Enhanced visibility: Connectivity status, CPU utilization, memory consumption, and device temperature are now exposed via dashboard and API, letting operations teams pull Connector telemetry into their NOCs.
Bringing SASE to DevOps workflows
CI/CD pipelines move fast, but the connectivity and security underneath them often do not. DevOps teams still commonly rely on traditional VPNs for remote access to development and operational tools — a legacy hub-and-spoke model that is slow, cumbersome to manage, and exposed to both known and zero-day vulnerabilities.
Developers are adept at finding workarounds when security gets in their way, so access controls must simply work. The goal is for all users and servers across build, staging, and production environments to be orchestrated through centralized Zero Trust controls, regardless of tooling or location. That includes support for ad hoc policy changes and temporary access for contractors or incident responders.
Extending ZTNA beyond user-to-app
ZTNA is well established for least-privileged user-to-app access, but securing DevOps workloads increasingly requires support for server-initiated and bidirectional traffic. This points toward an overlay mesh model across clouds, VPCs, and network segments without relying on routers. Not every SASE platform can handle these flows without routing changes or security tradeoffs, so "any-to-any connectivity" claims warrant scrutiny.
Cloudflare extends ZTNA to cover the full set of user-to-app cases while adding mesh and peer-to-peer secure networking for service-to-service workflows. WARP Connector underpins this: it lets administrators manage private networks with overlapping IP ranges including VPC and RFC1918 space, supports server-initiated traffic and peer-to-peer applications like SCCM, AD, and VoIP, and enables deterministic routing across existing private networks. The same platform handles ZTNA, VPN replacement, and enterprise SASE, with automation available through Cloudflare's Terraform provider.
What single-vendor SASE actually requires
Cloudflare One runs on the connectivity cloud, positioned as a unified platform of composable services connecting enterprise and Internet networks, clouds, apps, and users. The architecture is designed to handle east-west traffic between branches and headquarters, not just egress to the Internet — a limitation of SASE platforms whose data centers were built for outbound traffic and lack a middle mile for branch-to-branch or branch-to-cloud flows.
The practical measure of single-vendor SASE is whether one platform can cover every on-ramp, every traffic pattern, and every team — networking, security, and DevOps alike — without forcing compromises on routing or inspection. On that basis, consolidation only delivers if the underlying architecture was unified from the start, not assembled later.
