SD-WAN solutions use real-time path monitoring to determine the most effective way to route business-critical data. It reduces congestion that slows performance-intensive applications and ensures latency-sensitive data gets the best possible bandwidth.
Ensure your vendors can report on network events such as packet loss, jitter, and queue depth. Also, check that their devices can send these to a central event-handling system, such as syslog.
Scalability
SD-WAN technology provides scalability for business growth through software to manage network access and connections. Instead of relying on traditional MPLS connections, SD-WAN technologies use multiple transport services — including broadband Internet, LTE, and satellite data connections — to monitor WAN links for performance and stability. Software-based intelligence intelligently steers application packets to the best WAN link, increasing bandwidth and performance and minimizing latency. SD-WAN offers a sub-second failover if one WAN link fails, preventing business disruption.
In addition, SD-WAN solutions can identify the bandwidth requirements of different types of network traffic and prioritize them to ensure that critical applications receive adequate resources. It helps improve collaboration and teamwork applications like video conferencing or chat programs. It also eliminates congestion caused by less critical but bandwidth-intensive apps such as file downloads or email.
With SD-WAN, businesses can also improve the performance of cloud and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) apps through bandwidth optimization. Organizations can avoid expensive MPLS costs, reduce latency, and improve application performance by directing traffic directly to the cloud rather than backhauling it.
Increasing reliance on remote connectivity and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications has pushed legacy WAN architectures to their limits. To learn more about SD-WAN and how it can help you address these challenges by scheduling a no-BS demo today!
Flexibility
The traditional WAN architecture backhauled network traffic to the data center for security inspection before sending it out to remote locations, creating intolerable latency issues for cloud-based applications. SD-WAN eliminates this “trombone effect” by enabling direct cloud connectivity for business applications and routing traffic to the optimum path based on performance and availability.
Using SD-WAN, a network administrator can write operational regulations centrally and simultaneously deploy them to multiple gateways and routers. It reduces or eliminates the need to manage individual gateways and routers, making it easier to expand a network without investing in new hardware infrastructure or hiring a team of specialized technicians.
SD-WAN solutions can also use multiple transports on a single link to add redundancy, ensuring that the backup path is always active with load balancing and available for failover in the event of a primary path failure. Whether using MPLS, broadband internet, or 3G/4G cellular connections, an SD-WAN solution provides the flexibility to connect branches regardless of transport restrictions and carrier limitations.
Finally, a centralized control function on an SD-WAN allows IT to monitor network conditions across a global footprint and rapidly shift traffic when necessary. It enables critical applications to take priority and avoid congestion while reducing bandwidth requirements for less-critical apps through caching and other optimization techniques. This flexibility makes it much easier for employees in field-based locations to access company data and applications, no matter their connection type or location.
Convenience
With more remote workers than ever before logging on from locations across the country and globe using a mix of personal and company devices, security has become a growing concern. SD-WAN provides an efficient solution by separating the network control plane from the data plane, allowing providers to monitor and manage services and applications through a single unified dashboard. It simplifies management while reducing overhead and improving performance.
An additional benefit of an SD-WAN is the ability to prioritize bandwidth for critical business applications over various network connections, including MPLS, broadband Internet, and even cellular. Eliminates the need to backhaul traffic between branches and the data center, resulting in significant cost savings. The technology also enables a more consistent network experience. The software-based intelligence dynamically selects the best path for each application, ensuring that the most essential traffic is delivered over the highest quality connections.
Lastly, an SD-WAN provides business-driven monitoring that analyzes critical network links to detect issues, often in minutes rather than the hours or days it took with traditional networks. If a network connection fails or becomes congested, an SD-WAN delivers rapid traffic rerouting to alternate paths that avoid outages and maintain business operations.
Centralized orchestration also helps reduce the potential for human errors that can compromise security and performance. By eliminating the need for IT personnel to have physical access to routers at branch offices, an SD-WAN enables administrators to deploy configuration changes in a matter of minutes.
Security
As applications have become feature-rich and content-heavy, they demand more bandwidth from the WAN. In addition, many legacy WAN architectures require backhauling data from remote locations to the central network, adding complexity and cost. SD-WAN improves performance by separating traffic between networks, prioritizing critical data, and directing it over the best route to guarantee quality. It allows smaller businesses to use low-cost Internet connectivity for network services and minimizes the need to hire additional IT specialists to manage local IT infrastructure.
SD-WANs use a secure, encrypted tunnel to link every site, making creating a single management platform for security and networking policies easy. The centralized management makes it easier to keep track of all connections and make changes for a smoother user experience. It also helps to increase security as the centralized platform can monitor and analyze all traffic across the WAN to detect issues quickly and respond accordingly.
A key benefit of SD-WAN is the ability to secure and direct local Internet breakout for cloud application access. While the majority of fundamental SD-WANs offer limited application classification features relying on predefined definitions and manually created ACLs, a business-driven SD-WAN can automatically update these policies based on new applications to ensure that users always have a seamless experience. It is significant for e-commerce sites that depend on fast, reliable connections to generate sales.