What capabilities does the overlay SD-WAN fabric provide?

• A. Application-aware routing, policy enforcement, encryption, and tunnel management across underlays.
• B. Only hardware cabling and physical wiring.
• C. Only firewalling at the network edge with no routing.
• D. Only monitoring without any policy control.

Answer: (A)

The overlay SD-WAN fabric exists to orchestrate traffic across diverse underlying networks by bringing control, security, and intelligence together in one space. It enables application-aware routing, meaning the network can recognize different applications and steer their traffic along the best paths based on real-time conditions and policy. It enforces policies consistently across all sites—branches, data centers, and cloud connections—so security rules, QoS, and access controls apply everywhere, not just at a single edge. It also provides encryption to protect data as it traverses any path, ensuring confidentiality across the entire fabric. Finally, it manages tunnels between sites, creating and maintaining secure connections across the various underlays and automatically adjusting as networks change or failover is needed.

The other options describe only parts of the picture (physical cabling, edge firewalling with no routing, or monitoring without policy), but they don’t capture how the overlay fabric combines routing decisions, policy enforcement, security, and tunnel management across multiple transport networks.