Network security firm Untangle this week announced a series of new features for its SD-WAN router, including the company’s predictive routing technology.

The technology is designed to translate information from packet headers, out of band information, and past network activity to predict and classify the traffic at the first packet, said Heather Paunet, VP of product management at Untangle. From there, the SD-WAN router can send this traffic across the best link based on available bandwidth and latency, she explained in an email to SDxCentral.

“Now that the internet is nearly exclusively encrypted, it’s not easy to recognize applications, as the only available data may be just an IP address and a port number,” Paunet said. “With Untangle’s predictive routing, we use our own proprietary algorithms to be able to recognize applications.”

Traditional means of getting past network encryption required intensive processing of secure-sockets layer (SSL) decryption technologies, which while effective can contribute to network latency, according to Paunet.

Untangle’s SD-WAN router also features branch office connectivity, remote management, and a stateful firewall.

Untangle officially launched the router at the end of 2019 after its announcement the prior spring.

Paunet said Untangle had originally hoped to address many of the pain points faced by small to midsized businesses (SMBs) that were expanding while relying on existing firewalls for bandwidth optimization.

Untangle initially considered adding this functionality into its firewall product, Paunet said, but the company “quickly realized that introducing an SD-WAN router into the product portfolio would expand the benefits for SMBs more than a simple feature within our [next-generation firewall].”

Untangle’s SD-WAN router packs a stateful firewall, but it's also designed to tie into the company’s next-generation firewall. This enables consistent policies to be applied across geographically dispersed locations riding on a single unified threat management (UTM) device at headquarters, Paunet said

Untangle is aiming the router at SMBs and distributed enterprises with at least one branch office.

“These SMBs currently have a combination of business applications in the cloud and on-premise being used daily by their employees to support their customers' needs,” said Paunet.

Untangle hopes to make it easy for IT departments and network administrators to extend the enterprise’s security policies to a branch while controlling access rights and ensuring sensitive information stays on the right side of the firewall, she explained.