Businesses are breaking all barriers and adopting new market trends in their operation to stay true to the digital requirements and the cloud-centric world. This revolution in the organizational setups has taken a pivotal turn in light of the global pandemic, where people are working from various spheres of the globe and require uninterrupted connectivity and access. This growing demand for increased bandwidth, latency-sensitive applications, and extreme reliance on network availability and quality are pushing organizations to rethink their networking structures. But there lies a million-dollar question—how to redesign enterprise networking systems without adding to the burgeoning costs and complexity of managing a wide area network?
Here’s the answer, software-defined wide area network or SD-WAN.
SD-WAN technology is a revolutionizing virtualized service that connects and extends enterprise networks over large geographical distances. It allows complete control and management of the IT infrastructure through a robust virtual WAN architecture that securely connects users to numerous applications. It also allows network administrators to monitor WAN connectivity and manage traffic, sustaining high speed and advanced connectivity. In a nutshell, SD-WAN is the way to modernize network and prepare businesses for today’s digital era.
Figure 1: The SD-WAN architecture
Let’s answer the next big question. What’s the difference between WAN and SD-WAN?
So far, organizations used traditional WAN to connect users located at different areas or branch offices to applications hosted at the headquarter or in data centres. The security and reliable connectivity were ensured by MPLS circuits is such a setup. However, this networking configuration fails to serve the purpose in a cloud environment. And, why is that?
Today, organizations are continuously adopting SaaS, IaaS, and other applications running on multiple clouds. The conventional WANs are not designed to grasp the explosion of networking traffic that cloud and cloud-native applications bring. Add to that the growing security risks and compliance issues. Protecting business-critical applications while increasing remote access is now a business imperative lack of which can result in poor user experience and overburdened administrations.
The new-age WAN is designed to address the emerging challenges, enhance user experience, ensure bandwidth optimization, and improve performance of critical applications without compromising security and data privacy. SD-WAN is a modernized approach to network connectivity that lowers operational costs and optimizes resource usage for multisite deployments.
Key benefits of SD-WAN
At present, most enterprises function in a geographically-distributed organisational structure. SD-WAN has a number of benefits for them in store. Let’s have a glance at them!
Simplified Network Management:
Deployment of SD-WAN enables IT managers to create and update security rules in real-time as and when the network requirements alter. This is possible because every device connected in the network is centrally managed and the routing is based on application policies. The amalgamation of SD-WAN and zero-touch provisioning automates deployment and configuration processes. Alongside, network complexity is reduced, business analytics and bandwidth forecasting are enabled, and appropriate utilisation of resources is facilitated.
Enhanced Performance and Experience:
Within a SD-WAN setup, application traffic is dynamically routed, eliminating the process of backhauling traffic to centralised locations. In turn, users encounter efficient access to cloud-based resources and augmented experience.
Cost Effectiveness:
Network administrators can substitute or move traffic from private MPLS to lower-cost broadband connectivity, without getting involved in the trouble to reconfigure routers and gateways on an individual basis. Another area where SD-WAN delivers cost saving is administration, which includes network service and ongoing maintenance. There is no requirement for experts to visit remote sites for deployment as they can fix it from any location using centralized and policy-based management.
For more information, visit Cloud4C SD-WAN Services.
