HomeBusinessA Beginner's Guide to SD-WAN

A Beginner’s Guide to SD-WAN

SD-WAN is a powerful networking solution that offers a range of benefits. These include improved network performance, flexibility, and security.

It can help your business improve productivity by prioritizing critical applications across all locations. It can also reduce costs by lowering bandwidth usage and using public internet connections instead of leased circuits.

What is SD-WAN?

The underlying concept behind SD-WAN is network programmability. This is the idea that networking hardware shouldn’t be statically configured; software should handle all networking and security functions. This makes it possible to change how networking functions are executed and simplifies the process of provisioning devices.

The basics of SD-WAN solutions enable IT teams to control traffic on an application-by-application basis with a centralized policy management framework. They can prioritize, monitor and adapt WAN connections based on business requirements for consistent quality of experience (QoE) for users. These business requirements can range from the priority of critical mission applications to must-enforced security policies and even cost efficiencies for different locations.

An SD-WAN solution creates a virtual overlay that abstracts underlying WAN connections (Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS], internet broadband, fiber, or 4G LTE) to deliver on the programmability concept. The solution then centralizes network control and enables real-time application traffic management over these links. This approach allows enterprises to keep existing WAN connections and reduces costs by lowering data transmission over expensive leased lines.

The best SD-WAN solutions also provide resiliency by actively monitoring and directing traffic to a different route when detecting an underperforming WAN link. This means fewer outages and lower latency and jitter to improve user experience. An ideal SD-WAN solution should support load balancing, redundancy, and policy-based routing algorithms for resiliency.

What are the Benefits of SD-WAN?

The primary benefits of SD-WAN are superior application performance and business productivity, reduced costs, and simplified management. It provides a seamless on-ramp to the cloud for critical applications and ensures a consistent and high-quality experience for end-users. Secure connectivity is also important to companies with sensitive data such as credit card numbers or patient records. SD-WAN encrypts data in transit, which protects against hackers eavesdropping on connections to ensure that only authorized parties can access data.

SD-WAN provides centralized control over all WAN edge functions, including routing, security services, and performance monitoring. This allows IT teams to easily and quickly make network changes with a single pane of glass rather than having to program each device in the traditional network individually. This also significantly reduces human error that can result in a compromise of performance or security.

Advanced SD-WAN solutions provide a more granular approach to managing traffic at the session level so that each application receives its optimal performance. They can prioritize specific applications, optimize for quality of service, and support secure local internet breakout of IaaS and SaaS application traffic at the branch to deliver better cloud performance.

Finally, an advanced SD-WAN can actively monitor multiple WAN transport services and utilize carrier diversity to reduce the likelihood of outages due to a single point of failure. This is often called application-aware routing and is achieved through intelligent traffic prioritization and using different WAN links, such as direct internet or MPLS.

How Does SD-WAN Work?

The SD-WAN architecture creates a virtual overlay that abstracts underlying private or public WAN connections such as MPLS, fiber, broadband internet, and LTE. This enables networks to keep existing connectivity while centralizing network control and enabling real-time application traffic management across the overlay.

This flexibility also allows a centralized network manager to set policies that govern how distributed edge devices, such as routers in branch locations or mobile workforce sites, route traffic. These policies can be based on business priority, application performance and resiliency, and other factors that help drive desired outcomes like improved application performance, lower latency, and secure connectivity to cloud-based applications.

As mentioned, the SD-WAN technology converges traditional WAN capabilities such as load balancing and WAN optimization with networking security services such as CASB, FWaaS, and Zero Trust to help deliver a complete business outcome-focused solution. This helps to simplify the WAN architecture by reducing the number of vendors and devices and provides easier management via a single, cloud-delivered platform.

SD-WAN technology also works well with cellular connectivity, especially 5G, which has lower latency than 4G and can extend coverage to remote workers. As a result, it can enable organizations to connect and prioritize critical business applications with low-latency connections that improve productivity and customer experience while lowering costs.

What Are the Challenges of SD-WAN?

The biggest challenge is enabling the flexibility to prioritize business-critical traffic, avoid packet loss, and reduce jitter for a great user experience. SD-WAN can do this by providing multiple logical links that combine direct internet broadband or private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services.

Another challenge is ensuring that data stays secure across the network. SD-WAN can help with this by using security features like advanced firewalls and secure web gateway to provide robust connectivity and ensure that data is never sent over the public internet where malicious actors could intercept it.

IT teams must also be prepared to make ongoing changes as the business evolves. The agility of an SD-WAN solution can save IT staff significant time and frustration compared to the manual programming required of traditional WAN devices.

Finally, selecting an approach that delivers the desired outcomes for your organization is important. The lines could be clearer between DIY, co-managed, and fully managed SD-WAN solutions, so IT teams need to ensure that their selection is based on features that produce the best results for their network. Consider looking at vendors that offer appliances with SASE, cloud vendor access, and advanced security built into the platform. This will result in less complexity, lower costs, and increased productivity.

Popular posts

My favorites