A business-driven SD-WAN can support centralized configuration, making changes much easier than with traditional device-centric WAN architectures. This helps minimize human errors and ensure consistent performance and security.
A traditional network connects each office with dedicated private circuits (like Multiprotocol Label Switching, or MPLS). This is expensive and restricts the options for routing traffic.
What is SD-WAN?
The business requirements of today’s enterprises require new approaches to network connectivity. These include remote offices and branches connecting to the headquarters data center via a secure internet connection (WAN) and cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) applications running in the cloud or hosted by an IaaS provider. Enterprises need a network model with bandwidth, performance, and redundancy to meet these business demands while keeping costs down.
An SD-WAN offers centralized control and management of network connections and security mechanisms. It enables businesses to utilize various transport types, including MPLS, broadband internet, wireless, LTE, and virtual private networks (VPNs). It also provides traffic steering in an application-driven manner based on business intent, improves network security, and simplifies the WAN architecture.
Traditional networking models like multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) use dedicated circuits to connect branch and regional offices to the data center. These circuits can be expensive to maintain and not scalable to support the increasing volume of traffic generated by a growing number of SaaS and IaaS applications. An SD-WAN allows a network to connect sites using broadband internet, which is far more cost-effective, scalable, and reliable than MPLS.
Many SD-WAN vendors offer a fully managed solution for their products, eliminating IT need to deploy and manage an on-premise appliance at each site. They also offer an opportunity to leverage the existing infrastructure by integrating with existing firewalls and VPNs.
Benefits of SD-WAN
Today’s digital businesses need a high-performing network to deliver the anywhere, anytime experiences that customers and employees expect. Legacy WAN architectures reach their limits, creating bottlenecks that erode application performance and frustrate end users. SD-WAN explained a way around these limitations, improving application performance and reducing costs while increasing agility and security.
SD-WAN improves application performance by incorporating techniques that optimize applications for specific conditions. This allows organizations to reduce latency, jitter, and packet loss, which helps create a good user experience. Additionally, SD-WAN can help reduce costs by minimizing the amount of data that is routed over expensive, leased MPLS circuits. Instead, it can send less-critical data over low-cost, broadband internet connections and reserve private links for mission-critical or latency-sensitive traffic.
Lastly, SD-WAN can offer increased agility by making connecting remote locations to the company’s network easier. By building software-based tunnels back to headquarters, companies can provide workers with direct access to cloud apps without sacrificing security.
With centralized policy management and control, IT teams can simplify network operations and make rolling out changes at multiple branches easier. This can save on both hardware and labor costs, and it can also help increase the speed of troubleshooting and resolution times for issues. As a result, IT can focus more on strategic projects that improve the business and drive growth.
Challenges of SD-WAN
SD-WAN offers many advantages, including centralized control and automation of WAN devices; better performance of mission-critical applications over less expensive internet connections; reduced network costs by offloading MPLS circuits to SD-WAN and using internet connectivity for non-mission critical apps; and improved security by encrypting data in transit. However, enterprises must be prepared to face the challenges of SD-WAN.
Changing how they manage their WANs is the most significant challenge for any organization adopting SD-WAN. IT teams must document business application flows and identify which features are must-haves vs. nice-to-haves for their organizations. Additionally, IT teams should choose a service provider and managed services partner that can understand their overall digital transformation strategy and provide a consultative approach.
As a part of an SD-WAN solution, a network administrator will need to be able to view all of the paths traffic is traversing and how it’s performing. This will allow IT to troubleshoot issues like slowed response times and determine which policies are causing the issue. It will also be necessary to compare path selection over time, which can be challenging without a proper tool set in place.
Finally, IT needs to ensure that their SD-WAN solution can handle the varying needs of their global locations. This means ensuring that their solution supports multiple internet connection types and can overcome latency caused by distance (such as when traveling abroad) by connecting to high-performing ISPs in those regions.
Conclusions
SD-WAN enables IT teams to build and deploy operational policies across multiple WAN branch routers via a single management console. This can simplify IT management significantly. It also provides centralized visibility into all data transmission to reduce troubleshooting across the network.
SD-WAN can also improve WAN performance by directing traffic over the most efficient path on an application basis. This translates to greater bandwidth efficiency, lower costs, and improved QoE for business-critical applications. It can also help enterprises migrate to the cloud with reduced application latency and security risks.
A significant challenge with SD-WAN is that IT teams must fully understand the ramifications of any configuration changes before deploying them in their network. This is crucial to ensure application performance, employee productivity, and end-user experience are not negatively impacted.
Another issue with SD-WAN is that it can lead to performance degradation if IT teams are not monitoring the quality of Internet connections. For example, if an Internet service provider (ISP) experiences a problem, the SD-WAN solution can accidentally route all traffic over that link. This can cause lag and slowdown. To avoid this, IT teams should ensure they work with an MSP that offers a managed SD-WAN solution with nationwide access to installers and a centralized Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC). This will enable them to monitor the performance of all Internet links at every branch office and resolve problems quickly.
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