An engineer is designing a WAN solution for a customer with teams in different branch locations that need to communicate. The teams also need to access enterprise applications hosted in the data…

Having a separate VRF for *each branch location* would provide location isolation, but it wouldn't inherently address the distinct routing and security requirements for corporate versus guest users within the same branch or network infrastructure.

Providing separate WAN connectivity from a different service provider exclusively for guests would be an expensive and inefficient solution compared to leveraging the existing corporate WAN with VRFs for traffic segmentation.

While a firewall in the data center is crucial, simply filtering guest traffic *after* it reaches the data center does not provide the network-level segmentation across the WAN that VRFs offer, which prevents guest traffic from even traversing corporate routes before reaching the firewall.

Using an MPLS Layer 3 VPN with two distinct VRFs – one for corporate users and another for guests – allows for complete routing table separation on the WAN. The corporate VRF can provide access to internal data centers, cloud resources, and inter-branch communication, while the guest VRF can be strictly routed to the internet gateway in the data center, ensuring isolation and adherence to access policies while leveraging a single WAN infrastructure.