Cloud Reliability

The Edge2WAN cloud firewall ensures connectivity to the cloud by employing vector routing (or multi-link routing) across two or more Internet service providers. By connecting to two or more different providers, the Edge2WAN cloud firewalls can automatically failover cloud-based application across a backup link in the event that the primary link fails. This failover happens within seconds and can automatically failback once the primary link is restored.

Automated ISP Failover / Failback

During a failover end-users will hardly notice as most application perform keep alives which restores the application once the secondary ISP link takes over. The Edge2WAN cloud firewall also employs something called ESP (Enhanced Session Persistence) which ensures that application sessions always use the correct WAN link when multiple links are available. This is a significant issue that many "dual-WAN firewall" products do not handle properly.

Link Selection Policies
The Edge2WAN appliance includes the ability to create ordered policies for routing inbound and outbound traffic based on the status of each WAN link. This way network administrators can determine how traffic is routed, and under what circumstances, in the event an outage occurs on any of the ISP links. This "ordered" application of rules provides administrators with a great degree of flexibility when configuring failover policies.

Session Persistence
The Edge2WAN appliance has built-in enhanced session policy-routing which ensures that applications which are sensitive to link hopping maintain their state throughout the session. Network administrators can also create policies for specific destination networks to allow either more relaxed or stricter session enforcement based on the organizations unique requirements.

Without The Edge2WAN

There are a number of other products on the market, typically "firewall" products which say they also offer link balancing and redundancy. The reality that most of these products lack a number of critical features that are required to deliver a true solution, including:

Session Persistence Capabilities
Most "firewall" solutions which include link balancing capabilities do not perform well when used with applications which require session persistence. Much of the time users will find that applications only work some of the time while other applications stop working in the middle of a file upload, etc. The Edge2WAN appliance is an enterprise class solution which does not suffer from these issues.

True Link Bonding
Unlike most other "firewall" solutions which include some form of limited link failover and/or balancing, none of those solutions offer the ability to bond WAN links for improved web-based downloads by utilizing ALL of the active ISP connections at the same time. This is one of the more unique capabilities of the Edge2WAN appliance and one that provides a significant advantage over other solutions in the market today.