The General Bank of Greece plans to upgrade its legacy, end-of-life WAN network with a new flexible, manageable, and scalable solution. The main requirements are ZTP support, end-to-end encryption…

SD-branch consolidates branch LAN and WAN functions onto a single platform but does not inherently shift ownership to a provider to eliminate CAPEX in the way a managed service does.

DMVPN with PfR is a legacy overlay technology requiring significant on-premises router CAPEX and does not natively provide ZTP or modern application-aware policies.

In managed SD-WAN, the service provider owns and operates the SD-WAN infrastructure, so the customer pays an OPEX subscription rather than investing capital in hardware and software licenses. The solution natively includes ZTP for automated device onboarding, IPsec-based end-to-end encryption, deep-packet-inspection-driven application awareness, and VPN-based segmentation, fulfilling every stated technical requirement while directly addressing the CTO's CAPEX reduction goal.

Unmanaged SD-WAN still requires the bank to purchase and maintain its own appliances and controllers, which does not achieve the stated goal of CAPEX reduction.