Which SD WAN element can be a physical appliance?

SD WAN elements can be deployed in a physical WAN edge, virtualized server instance, or software application. The main reasons for deploying SD WAN using a physical appliance are as follows:

• Physical dedicated hardware appliances offer better throughput and processing performance compared to virtual servers or software applications.
• Hardware devices are configurable with dual power supplies and redundancy, which in turn offer improved uptime.
• Edge devices are sometimes designed with hardware security that is not possible to replicate within a virtual or software environment.
• Management of a central hardware device can often be simpler because all users are forced through a gateway.
• There may be a need to separate out physical interfaces.

However, public cloud technology, which is accessed by users' laptops, phones, or tablets, is now preferred over physical devices, unless there is a specific use case as outlined in this knowledge article.