What Is SD-WAN? Understand SD Wide-Area Network

The traditional hardware-based networking model requires onsite hardware installation, complex configurations, and manual updates. SD-WAN technology eliminates these problems, enabling businesses to quickly and easily onboard new locations or remote employees, and ensuring secure access to critical services.

The software-based architecture of SD-WAN also simplifies ongoing maintenance and upgrades. This centralized management capability not only reduces both capex and opex but also increases flexibility. Network and security policies can be managed from a single pane of glass, improving the efficiency of network management.

Cost-Effectiveness

An SD-WAN solution can reduce operating costs by optimizing the amount of data that needs to be sent across the WAN. This is especially true when a business replaces expensive multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) connections with more cost-effective broadband or LTE connections. The ability to leverage SD-WAN technology across different types of connections helps businesses efficiently scale their networks.

SD-WAN also integrates secure WAN features to improve network security. By leveraging secure SD-WAN capabilities, businesses can optimize network performance through intelligent traffic prioritization and adaptive routing. This ensures that each process is sent along the best available path, enhancing network services and delivering an improved end-user experience.

For NetOps teams, a key aspect of an SD-WAN solution is the ability to easily monitor and troubleshoot network connectivity from the centralized control plane. This visibility into service providers, link utilization, and WAN traffic patterns allows teams to make data-driven adjustments to network policies, enhancing secure access and network performance across the entire infrastructure.

The secure SD-WAN architecture involves customer premises equipment (CPE) communicating with a central controller through a secure connection. The controller consolidates functions traditionally spread across routers, WAN optimizers, and security platforms. Requests for secure access service edge (SASE) or other network services are processed at the edge and forwarded to end users via a secure connection traversing the WAN fabric, thus enhancing both network and security protocols.

Additionally, SD-WAN technology integrates with software-defined networking (SDN) principles to further improve network management and automation. This is particularly beneficial for managing complex environments, such as connecting multiple data centers or extending secure access to remote branches and the cloud. Leveraging secure access service edge (SASE) enables secure connectivity across distributed locations, ensuring seamless performance and consistent security policies.

With the combination of centralized control, simplified management, and built-in network security features, SD-WAN provides an optimal solution for modern businesses. Its ability to enhance secure WAN capabilities while reducing costs makes it a strategic choice for organizations looking to improve network performance and scalability.

Increased Flexibility with SD-WAN

As businesses rely more on cloud-based applications, the amount of data traveling over the network increases. This traffic can cause performance issues like latency and packet loss, affecting productivity. SD-WANs can help to improve performance by prioritizing critical business applications and steering them over the most appropriate routes.

Software-defined wide-area network also provides greater flexibility than traditional WAN architectures. IT teams can use existing site connections and add an SD-WAN device to enable load balancing, WAN optimization, and zero-touch provisioning capabilities. This helps to reduce costs and makes it easier to scale the SD-WAN deployment as a business grows.

Additionally, SD-WANs provide a simpler management experience. IT can centrally manage the policy and application mapping of multiple sites using a single connection to the internet. This can reduce the number of points of failure and increase the network’s reliability.

As software-defined wide area network popularity grows, network observability companies are stepping in to deliver performance insights into these platforms. Kentik, for example, ingests IPFIX from the Cisco, Silver Peak/HPE, and VMware platforms to provide overlay, underlay, and application traffic visibility. This enables NetOps to understand better service providers, link utilizations, and other factors that can impact the quality of an SD-WAN deployment. This data informs and optimizes policies at the centralized SD-WAN controller.

Improved Performance

As a software-based network, software-defined wide-area network deployments can offer improved performance over traditional WAN architectures. Application-aware routing prioritizes traffic based on specific application policies and network conditions. This helps improve application performance and reduce costs by avoiding circuit and telecom costs for non-essential traffic. It also enables local breakout from remote sites directly to the cloud, reducing latency and improving performance.

A more granular level of performance can be achieved by incorporating security functions into an SD-WAN architecture. For example, Silver Peak and Kentik’s integration features allow for the inclusion of network telemetry (IPFIX) from an SD-WAN platform into the broader observability ecosystem. This provides flow and telemetry data to be correlated with performance insights, enabling an organization to optimize the SD-WAN better and improve overall management.

As digital transformation continues transforming business operations, IT teams are looking for ways to reduce the time and complexity of managing their WAN infrastructure. While it may be difficult to justify the initial investment required to implement an SD-WAN solution, the value added can outweigh these costs and provide significant performance improvements for business-critical applications and services. For this reason, it’s worth exploring your options and determining if an SD-WAN deployment is right for your organization. This is an especially important consideration for businesses that have persisted with old WAN architectures. Click to read door dash fast pay not working.

Increased Security

What is SD-WAN? A software-defined wide area network can also enable businesses to connect to the cloud more easily and quickly. This can lower data storage costs and make accessing applications from multiple locations easier.

With multi-cloud and SaaS adoption on the rise, security has become one of the top concerns for enterprise networks. SD-WAN deployments offer several security benefits to help address these concerns.

First, centralized management of multiple connection types improves application performance and uptime. In addition, a software-defined wide area network centralized control function can help businesses direct traffic throughout their networks more effectively. This is important because directing traffic differently across different sites can undermine the overall security efforts of an organization.

Another way an SD-WAN offers better security is by improving network visibility. Instead of relying on individual routers and gateways, software-defined wide-area networks provide real-time visibility into underlay and overlay networks across all locations. This enables NetOps teams to understand service providers, link utilization, and more. The unified view of application traffic also makes it easier to enforce security policies.

Finally, a software-defined wide area network can help reduce reliance on expensive MPLS circuits by sending low-priority data over cheaper public internet connections and reserving private links for mission-critical and latency-sensitive applications. This can save a business up to 50% or more in networking costs.

An enterprise’s ability to connect with customers and employees is critical to its success. A single hour of downtime can cost a business $300,000 in lost productivity and customer satisfaction. An SD-WAN can improve uptime and business agility with a single pane of glass for managing branch networks.