Networking and security teams often need help balancing complexity with application performance and security. This becomes especially challenging as organizations adopt multiple clouds.
Bandwidth-intensive applications or other network traffic on the underlay can consume significant bandwidth, resulting in congestion and reduced performance for SD-WAN traffic.
What is SD-WAN?
What is SD-WAN and how it works? SD-WAN technology virtualizes WAN connections, providing a secure tunnel to connect users to cloud applications and data. This reduces costs, improves agility and boosts performance over traditional MPLS. It allows organizations to select and route traffic across multiple WAN paths based on application type and priority, as well as supports a wide range of transport services (such as commodity broadband Internet, LTE and 3G), and it makes it easy to add or move bandwidth to meet changing business demands.
Compared to legacy network architectures, SD-WAN is much quicker and easier to deploy and manage. It also enables zero-touch provisioning to quickly and automatically configure new equipment, reducing deployment time and improving IT productivity. In addition, it provides a higher level of security than traditional networking technologies and can be managed from a single-pane-of-glass interface.
A good SD-WAN solution will have an encrypted overlay network, real-time monitoring and a policy-driven approach. It will also offer several important business features like link-bonding and application optimization. For example, link-bonding combines multiple WAN links to improve availability and last-mile bandwidth by ensuring critical applications have the best connection. It also enhances bandwidth efficiency by directing traffic over the most cost-effective connection while prioritizing high-priority applications. In addition, application optimization can reduce jitter, packet loss and latency for a better user experience.
What is the Impact of SD-WAN?
The use case for SD-WAN is compelling for organizations of all sizes and sectors. Whether an enterprise has offices in a single city or globally, deploying SD-WAN improves network performance and provides new capabilities.
Centralized control and management of WAN overlay networks improves IT productivity and reduces the time needed to deploy and modify policies. Instead of requiring IT teams to manually configure routers at each site, a centralized SD-WAN controller can automatically program them. This enables zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) and slashes deployment times from weeks to minutes.
SD-WAN increases traffic visibility, ensuring all WAN connections are working correctly and enabling IT to identify performance issues quickly. Additionally, SD-WAN allows for load balancing or bonding of private and public WAN connections to provide extra theoretical capacity, backup, and resiliency.
Managed SD-WAN services are available from managed service providers. They can be an attractive option for small and midsize businesses without the resources to build their SD-WAN infrastructure. They can also provide WAN optimization, which improves application performance and ensures that the most important applications receive priority over others.
Some vendors combine SD-WAN with secure remote access strategies (SASE architecture) to offer comprehensive networking and security functions on a unified cloud platform. This approach, which also includes AI integrations, gives IT teams more visibility, control and data protection for branch users connecting to the internet rather than a hub-and-spoke network.
What is the Solution to SD-WAN?
Many businesses need help to keep up with the growing number of applications, data centers and cloud services. This has put a lot of pressure on WANs to deliver higher-quality performance and lower costs.
SD-WAN delivers a solution to these challenges by increasing flexibility and agility in the WAN architecture. It uses a software-defined overlay network that enables dynamic best-path routing to improve application performance. It also helps organizations reduce costs by leveraging multiple internet connections instead of expensive alternatives like MPLS.
Ensuring the platform meets security requirements is important when selecting an SD-WAN provider. Look for a solution that provides protection against DDoS attacks, spam and malware and enables you to monitor network traffic. It should also include microsegmentation to ensure only approved devices can access the network.
Finally, look for a platform that supports global connectivity. This is essential because many businesses operate in multiple locations across the globe. A solution that can use local internet connections in each location and then aggregate them to create a high-speed global private backbone is ideal.
Organizations can eliminate costly MPLS and deliver secure, reliable, high-quality internet access to their branches and data centers by combining an SD-WAN with a high-performance global private backbone. This allows them to boost application performance, improve the user experience and cost-effectively support cloud/SaaS services.
What is the Future of SD-WAN?
In today’s world of digital transformation, workplace modernization and remote worker initiatives, speed, performance and security are the keys to business success. It’s no longer practical to backhaul traffic from branch offices to the data center and back again since doing so introduces latency and diminishes application performance.
SD-WAN offers a more efficient, cost-effective and secure way to connect to cloud applications from all locations, including remote offices. Unlike traditional WAN architecture, which requires expensive on-site hardware and dedicated IT teams, an SD-WAN solution is software-based and can be managed centrally from a single console. This dramatically cuts monthly manpower and operational expenditure.
Additionally, an advanced SD-WAN solution can monitor the performance of underlying transport services and automatically redirect traffic on an application basis to a different path when the primary one becomes congested or fails. This ensures consistent application performance and high-quality user experience, even when WAN transport services are experiencing problems such as packet loss, jitter or latency.
As the market for SD-WAN continues to evolve, look for additional features to improve the technology’s functionality and efficiency. For example, many vendors now incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into their solutions to optimize performance and reduce downtime. In addition, zero-touch deployment will continue to gain traction for businesses to automate installing and configuring their SD-WAN.
