Sector guide and live tool
SD-WAN & SASE for Manufacturing
We typically see manufacturers are outgrowing their traditional networks as the likes of production lines, supply chains and visibility across distributed operations all have increased in their demands (with traditional MPLS-centric architectures increasingly struggling to meet these operational demands). Furthermore, ransomware attacks against manufacturing have surged 61% year on year in 2025, making it the most targeted critical infrastructure sector and placing an increased importance on both the networking and security of manufacturing operations. By moving to SD-WAN and SASE platforms, manufacturers can utilise capabilities such as application-aware routing, IT/OT segmentation and centralised management that each ensure production systems remain operational, whilst also ensuring cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.
Written by Harry Yelland (11 June 2026). Fact-checked by Robert Sturt (11 June 2026).
Best SD-WAN and SASE providers for manufacturing (2026)
Netify’s June 2026 manufacturing evaluation ranks: 1. Cato Networks (98.2); 2. NTT DATA / NTT Ltd. (94.6); 3. Orange Business (94.6); 4. Aryaka (92.3); 5. AT&T Business (92.3); 6. BT Business / BT Global (92.3); 7. Comcast Business / Masergy (92.3); 8. Telefónica Tech (92.3); 9. Verizon Business (92.3); 10. Colt Technology Services (91.1). Scores are computed live by the evidence engine at sase.netify.co.uk: 30 vendors graded on 40 capabilities, manufacturing sector evidence required.
No. 1 · Score 98.2 · Cloud-native SASE / SD-WAN provider · Typical deployment: hours
Single converged platform with no policy or log fragmentation across SD-WAN and security functions.
Watch out: Less suited to best-of-breed buyers wanting Zscaler or Netskope as the SSE layer.
No. 2 · Score 94.6 · Global managed network provider · Typical deployment: months
24x7 managed SD-WAN delivery via global operations centres with strong portal visibility.
Watch out: Platform fit depends on which vendor is being proposed (Palo Alto, Zscaler, others); evaluate platform independently.
No. 3 · Score 94.6 · Global managed SD-WAN / SASE provider · Typical deployment: months
Global managed network leadership with strong service assurance, NOC depth and field operations.
Watch out: Platform choice depends on which Orange-supported vendor is selected; underlying platform fit and roadmap should be evaluated independently.
No. 4 · Score 92.3 · Managed SD-WAN / SASE provider · Typical deployment: days
Unified SASE delivered as a managed service from end to end, including the private global core network and WAN optimisation.
Watch out: Smaller PoP footprint and partner ecosystem than the hyperscale SASE vendors; coverage must match your geographic profile.
No. 5 · Score 92.3 · Global carrier managed SD-WAN / SASE provider · Typical deployment: months
Major US carrier-led managed SD-WAN portfolio with multi-vendor platform options (including Fortinet for AT&T SASE).
Watch out: Underlying platform varies by service tier; buyers should confirm which platform supports the proposed scope.
No. 6 · Score 92.3 · Global/UK managed SD-WAN / SASE provider · Typical deployment: weeks
UK market leader for managed SD-WAN with deep access circuit ownership and field engineering capability.
Watch out: Platform choice and packaging vary; buyers should confirm which vendor platform is being proposed and why.
No. 7 · Score 92.3 · Managed SD-WAN / SASE provider · Typical deployment: weeks
SASE combining SD-WAN and security available fully managed or co-managed, drawing on Masergy AIOps heritage.
Watch out: International delivery depth depends on partnerships outside North America.
No. 8 · Score 92.3 · Global managed SD-WAN / SASE provider · Typical deployment: months
flexWAN and managed SD-WAN delivery with Cisco-based converged SD-WAN, security and SASE service.
Watch out: Platform is largely Cisco-led; buyers wanting platform optionality should evaluate alternatives.
No. 9 · Score 92.3 · Global carrier managed SD-WAN / SASE provider · Typical deployment: months
Global carrier-led managed SASE and SD-WAN with strong North American presence and international delivery.
Watch out: Platform is largely Versa-based; buyers wanting platform optionality should evaluate alternatives.
No. 10 · Score 91.1 · Enterprise managed SD-WAN / connectivity provider · Typical deployment: months
SD-WAN and SASE with strong European data sovereignty positioning.
Watch out: Global delivery depth outside Europe is less prominent than the largest global carriers.
Full grades, head-to-head tables and the complete field of 30: open the shortlist builder.
Manufacturing shortlist tool
Which vendors fit your production estate?
The full Netify shortlist engine, aligned to manufacturing: 30 vendors, 40 graded capabilities, manufacturing sector evidence required on every result. Computed live by sase.netify.co.uk.
Production priorities
Quick-start presets. Each one sets the matching capability requirements below, where you can refine feature by feature.
Operating model
Plants without on-site IT usually need fully managed or co-managed delivery; in-house suits estates with a dedicated network team and 24x7 cover for production windows.
Organisation size
Enterprise estates need multi-stakeholder procurement support and segmented domains across lines and brands; mid-market manufacturers without a SOC should weight managed security heavily.
Regions you must cover
Cover every plant, supplier site and 3PL you connect, not just HQ. Vendor coverage varies most in China, the Middle East and Latin America, which is where supply chains most often extend.
Cloud platforms
MES, ERP and OEE analytics increasingly run in public cloud. These grades reflect evidenced on-ramps and gateways into each platform.
AI capability
AIOps shortens fault isolation at plants with no engineer on site; AI security analytics helps spot OT-targeted attacks like the FrostyGoop and PIPEDREAM families earlier.
Deployment ceiling
Line launches and plant openings are dated commitments. This excludes vendors whose typical activation is slower than you need.
Scoring profile
Security led suits OT-threat-driven boards; network led suits MPLS replacement programmes; managed service led suits lean IT teams.
Resilience and size
DR evidence matters most where production cannot stop; shortlist size sets how many ranked vendors you take into an RFP.
Capability requirements (all 40 graded features)
Click once for required (vendors without evidence are excluded), twice for preferred (extra scoring weight), three times to clear. Your production priorities above pre-select the relevant features.
Or describe your estate to the AI advisor
The advisor maps plain language onto these same filters and explains the result. It can also compare two vendors head to head.
How does the manufacturing operating environment impact connectivity requirements?
Production Facilities and Factory Floors
For production facilities and factory floors, there is limited (to no) offline functionality offered for the likes of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and SCADA platforms, meaning that when the network fails, so do these systems. Even brief network outages can halt production lines as equipment awaits control signals and operators can lose visibility into process status, all of which leads to financial losses.
Integrated Manufacturing Plants
Within integrated manufacturing plants, they typically utilise real-time quality management systems, automated material handling and predictive maintenance platforms, all of which utilise the network, and downtime can potentially cause quality defects or, in more serious cases, safety incidents that have consequences well beyond the network team.
Warehouses & Distribution Centres
When a distribution centre network fails, orders cannot be fulfilled, inventory visibility is lost across the supply chain and delivery commitments cannot be met, with warehouse management systems (WMS) that coordinate storage locations, picking operations, shipping documentation and inventory tracking typically being more latency-sensitive than other applications.
Network performance, latency tolerance and what that means for network design
All of the above use cases are reliant on low latency and high reliability to ensure day-to-day activities aren't affected. Given this, when considering the shortfalls of traditional networks, it's easy to see how SD-WAN and SASE's capabilities can significantly improve these facets of network performance.
SD-WAN's application-aware routing addresses this by enforcing a traffic priority hierarchy dynamically across whatever underlay mix is available at a given site (the likes of fibre, broadband, 4G/5G and satellite connectivity can all be utilised) without requiring manual intervention when link conditions change, enabling production control and SCADA traffic to be prioritised.
Multi-site resilience is also incredibly important for manufacturers, ensuring continuous production via sub-second failover for near-continuous availability.
Production networks also frequently have to operate without dedicated on-site IT support at every facility. Zero-touch provisioning capabilities address this directly: equipment arrives pre-configured and connects automatically, IT teams monitor and troubleshoot remotely, reducing the complexity of deployment and support overhead.
Security and Compliance Drivers for Manufacturing Networks
UK GDPR, DPA 2018 and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025
Manufacturers process more personal data than is often appreciated: employee monitoring, access control, supplier databases and customer order management all fall within scope, and IoT devices processing biometric access controls or workforce monitoring data carry their own compliance obligations. UK GDPR, DPA 2018 and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (Royal Assent 19 June 2025) collectively impose legal obligations on how that data is collected, processed, stored and transmitted, with potential fines up to £17.5m or 4% of global annual turnover for serious breaches, which puts network security decisions in a different category than they were five years ago.
Cyber Threats Facing Manufacturing
Ransomware attacks surged 61% year-on-year (520 to 838 incidents, January to September 2025), and the Jaguar Land Rover attack in September 2025, which forced a complete shutdown across all UK plants for five weeks, illustrates what that looks like in practice: £196m in direct cyber-related costs, wholesale volumes declining 43.3%, total economic impact estimated at £1.9bn affecting over 5,000 supply chain organisations. The attack vectors specific to manufacturing are worth understanding:
- OT-specific malware targeting industrial control systems directly: FrostyGoop (targeting Modbus TCP) and PIPEDREAM (the first cross-industry ICS malware) being the most significant recent examples
- Supply chain vulnerabilities introduced through connected suppliers, logistics providers and maintenance contractors, each of which represents a network entry point that's often outside the IT team's direct control
- IT/OT convergence risks from previously air-gapped industrial control systems now connecting to corporate networks, expanding the attack surface in ways that legacy security architectures weren't designed to address
SASE architectures combining SD-WAN with integrated security functions (NGFW, CASB, IPS, malware detection) provide the network segmentation that's essential for preventing lateral movement between IT and OT environments, which is, in most manufacturing security assessments we're involved in, the primary concern.
Manufacturing SD-WAN/SASE Procurement: Sector-Specific Requirements
Manufacturing RFPs tend to raise the same gaps, not because organisations don't understand their requirements, but because generic SD-WAN question sets weren't written with OT environments in mind. A structured RFP tailored to your production environment, site mix and compliance obligations forces vendors to respond specifically to IT/OT segmentation, SCADA traffic prioritisation and operational resilience, rather than offering the same answer they'd give a financial services firm. The areas where manufacturing briefs most commonly need to go further than a standard question set are outlined below.
- Production expansion and site changes: define expected rates of facility openings, line expansions and relocations over the contract term, with contractual obligations for rapid provisioning and clean decommissioning. Vendors answer this question very differently, and it's where you see the clearest differentiation between those who've genuinely operated at manufacturing scale and those who haven't.
- Differentiated resilience by site type: production facilities require near-continuous availability with sub-second failover; warehouses may tolerate brief outages with workarounds in place. Specifying a single resilience standard across all sites either over-specifies for distribution centres or under-specifies for production. Neither outcome is desirable.
- Peak period performance: specify peak bandwidth needs and acceptable performance degradation during congestion. Shift changes, production ramp-ups and inventory synchronisation windows are all predictable, and it's reasonable to hold vendors to specific degradation thresholds rather than leaving them to interpret what 'peak' means.
- IT/OT convergence and segmentation: specify whether OT environments will share network infrastructure with enterprise IT and what security boundaries must exist. This is an area where vendor architectures vary significantly and where the wrong answer has direct implications for IEC 62443 compliance.
- Compliance audit support and vendor assurance: verify vendors' own ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications (treat these as a baseline rather than a differentiator) and require specific explanation of how they support UK GDPR compliance and emerging Cyber Security and Resilience Bill requirements.
Enterprise vs Mid-Market Manufacturing Network Challenges
Enterprise-Scale Organisations
What distinguishes enterprise manufacturing procurement from most other SD-WAN evaluations is the stakeholder complexity as much as the site count. Hundreds of locations with dedicated NOC, in-house OT security teams and complex network architectures including dedicated OT networks, enterprise SOCs and industrial network monitoring is one part of it, but the procurement process involves IT, OT, infosec and finance stakeholders with formal approval processes and, often, separate thresholds and occasionally conflicting priorities between them. Organisations running multiple production lines, business units or brands typically need differentiated service levels across those, and sometimes genuinely separate network domains, which makes the vendor’s ability to support that segmentation a procurement criterion rather than an implementation detail.
Mid-Market Manufacturers
Leaner IT teams making network decisions with broader responsibilities typically require simplified solutions rather than the kind of complex multi-vendor architecture that a large manufacturer can sustain (and resource to operate). It's worth noting that mid-market manufacturers typically lack dedicated SOCs, which makes the security model a more significant procurement decision than it would be for a large enterprise: the choice between a managed service provider, an integrated security-capable SD-WAN platform and an outsourced security monitoring arrangement has a bigger operational impact here. We'd generally recommend that mid-market manufacturers weight the managed service and integrated security questions more heavily in their RFP evaluation criteria than the standard question set prompts for.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary benefit of SD-WAN for manufacturing organisations?
The most significant benefit, in our view, is application-aware routing: the ability to prioritise production-critical traffic (SCADA, MES, PLCs) whilst ensuring non-critical applications don't compete for the same bandwidth during shift changes or production ramp-ups. Remote management through centralised orchestration and zero-touch deployment is part of it too, but the meaningful differentiator for manufacturing is that production-critical systems are prioritised in a way that accounts for the latency tolerances of industrial control systems, rather than just hoping that generic QoS policies are sufficient.
Why is SASE becoming essential for modern manufacturing environments?
The honest answer is that the threat landscape has changed faster than most manufacturing security architectures have. Maintaining separate networking and security tooling across dozens of production facilities creates management overhead that most IT teams struggle to sustain, and more critically, it produces the kind of inconsistent policy enforcement that leaves OT environments exposed, particularly where IT/OT convergence has expanded the attack surface beyond what legacy air-gap approaches were designed for. SASE converges the two into a single framework, and for manufacturers the practical effect is consistent security policy across both IT and OT environments, without needing a separate security stack at every facility. Ransomware attacks against manufacturing surging 61% in 2025 makes that more than an architectural preference.
How does SD-WAN help manufacturers address IT/OT convergence challenges?
The risk with IT/OT convergence isn't the connectivity itself, it's lateral movement. Once previously air-gapped industrial control systems connect to corporate networks, the attack surface expands in ways that are difficult to manage without granular segmentation. SD-WAN addresses this by enforcing segmentation policies that isolate SCADA systems, PLCs and production equipment from general corporate traffic, maintaining appropriate security boundaries whilst still supporting the connectivity that Industry 4.0 operations require. It's worth being specific in your RFP about what those boundaries need to look like: vendors' approaches vary, and a general claim of 'segmentation support' doesn't tell you much about whether their architecture can enforce the zones and conduits that IEC 62443 requires.
What impact does the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill have on manufacturing networks?
Manufacturing isn't currently directly in scope of the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill (introduced 12 November 2025), but the Bill grants government powers to expand coverage, and the direction of travel is clearly towards broader sector inclusion. The practical advice is to prepare now rather than wait for formal designation: the Bill introduces fines up to £17m or 4% of global turnover for serious breaches, and the gap between current manufacturing security postures and what those requirements will demand is, in our experience, often larger than organisations expect when they first assess it.
How does network latency affect manufacturing production systems?
For most enterprise applications latency is a performance consideration; for manufacturing production systems it's closer to a hard constraint in specific contexts. A delayed control signal reaching production equipment isn't just slow performance; it can mean a process deviation that isn't caught in time, or equipment that doesn't respond within the window that the quality or safety system assumed it would. The latency threshold that matters varies considerably by application type (SCADA control signals, real-time quality monitoring and predictive maintenance have different tolerances) but the underlying point is that treating them all under a single general SLA, the way you might for a standard enterprise network, isn't adequate for a production environment.
What should be included in a manufacturing SD-WAN RFP?
At minimum: clear requirements for IT/OT segmentation capabilities, peak bandwidth handling during production ramp-ups and shift changes, multi-site resilience with sub-second failover for critical production facilities, and specific vendor questions about SCADA, MES and production control traffic prioritisation whilst maintaining security boundaries between OT and enterprise IT. The vendor's own security certifications and their approach to UK GDPR compliance are also worth including: given the threat landscape in 2025, a vendor who can't evidence their own security posture is a third-party risk in itself. We'd recommend differentiating resilience requirements by site type rather than specifying a single standard, because the appropriate answer for a continuous production facility is genuinely different from the appropriate answer for a seasonal distribution centre, and vendors who treat them the same haven't thought it through.
How we researched this page
The written guidance comes from Harry Yelland, who drafted it on 11 June 2026 from Netify's manufacturing RFP work and from named public sources: UK ransomware incident counts for January to September 2025, the Jaguar Land Rover shutdown and its published cost estimates, the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill as introduced on 12 November 2025, IEC 62443, and the FrostyGoop and PIPEDREAM malware analyses. Robert Sturt, Netify's Managing Director, fact-checked the draft the same day. Where a figure has a date attached, that is the date it was checked.
The rankings and the tool borrow directly from the Netify comparison platform at sase.netify.co.uk/shortlist rather than restating it. The platform grades 30 SD-WAN and SASE vendors against 40 capabilities using public source evidence, on a six-level scale from confirmed capability to not confirmed. This page requests the manufacturing-filtered ranking from that platform every hour and the tool sends your filter choices to the same scoring engine, so a shortlist built here always matches one built on the platform itself. None of the vendor grades are written or stored on this page.
Sector, regional, cloud, AI and resilience grades are indicative desk research from June 2026. Confirm anything that matters to your procurement through a structured RFP, which Netify can issue to your shortlisted vendors.
Cite this research
Netify, "SD-WAN & SASE for Manufacturing (2026)", written by Harry Yelland, fact-checked by Robert Sturt: https://netify.co.uk/sd-wan-sase-for-manufacturing/
Machine-readable: https://netify.co.uk/sd-wan-sase-for-manufacturing/data.json · Live ranking source: https://sase.netify.co.uk/best/sd-wan-sase-providers-for-manufacturing/data.json · Programmatic shortlists: POST https://sase.netify.co.uk/api/mcp
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