Leveraging the benefits of SD WAN for your business
Software-defined networks (SD WANs) are an alternative to traditional wide area networks (WANs). Unlike traditional WANs, SD WANs operate above the physical network hardware level; an “overlay” which offers additional flexibility and functionality.
Traditional WANs are largely based on private telephony network provision, such as MPLS. While they offer great quality of service, they have not kept up with the changes as users and applications have moved beyond the enterprise and the traditional resilience perimeter has dissolved. Those traditional network architectures weren’t built to handle the workloads of cloud and digital transformation.
Let’s consider some of the reasons why SD WAN is more suited to today’s networking requirements and how you can leverage the benefits of SD WAN for your business.
Flexibility in service provision drives cost efficiencies
With SD WAN, you have a much wider choice of underlay network provision. You can continue to use some of your existing services, such as MPLS. Or you can opt to incorporate much less expensive Internet-based communications services, such as broadband or 5G.
Consequently, SD WAN offers new opportunities to build resilience. Plus, you can reduce costs by switching, since broadband connectivity costs much less than traditional MPLS services.
Improve the application experience for users
For today’s businesses, critical applications and services are often distributed across multiple clouds. With a conventional WAN, traffic is typically routed from remote or branch locations to a core location before accessing the Internet and cloud-based services. However, it makes little sense (either from a performance or cost perspective) to route that traffic over the WAN before breaking out to the Internet.
SD WAN makes a more nuanced approach more possible. By implementing a centrally managed and policy-driven approach, you can optimise connectivity based on traffic types. Internet traffic can be broken out locally and sent directly to the Internet. In this way, you can optimise costs, while ensuring higher availability and a more predictable service.
Managing the security implications of Internet connectivity
Of course, the more network traffic you send over Internet-based services, the more questions will be raised about information security in transit. SD WAN comes with security features which alleviate these traditional concerns.
SD WAN can support Internet protocol security (IPsec), virtual private network capabilities, end-to-end encryption of in-transit data and next-generation firewalls. In addition, they offer advanced monitoring, detection and response capabilities, web traffic inspection, and streamlined network security management with secure access service edge (SASE) integration.
Optimising network administration
Many of the security and SASE features of SD WAN, including traffic routing and cyber-attack prevention, can be automated. This frees time for your network administrators and IT staff.
This stands in contrast to traditional WAN, where network administrators were required to directly interact with routers, firewalls, switches and lines to reconfigure resources or resolve issues. Changes used to take hours or days, depending on network size and complexity.
Plus, these legacy approaches to managing WAN require levels of expertise for which it can be hard to recruit and retain the necessary talent. These valuable resources would be better redirected to proactive work to optimise and protect your network, rather than spent on routine maintenance and change support.
Problem identification and rapid response
The automated network monitoring of your SD WAN solution makes it possible to detect outages in milliseconds. Then, automated, policy-driven responses to outages ensure that any associated disruption is kept to a minimum – even without direct intervention by your IT or network support team being required.
Building in additional resilience and enhanced troubleshooting is vital today, when so much of our business operations depend on connectivity. These capabilities can be an important source of competitive advantage.
Centralised network visibility and management
Your SD WAN solution offers 24/7 clear visibility of the network via a single portal, so you can gain a real overview, can check the status of different devices connected to the network in real time, make adjustments and manage operation. As a result, you can take a more proactive approach to network monitoring and management.
Centralised management also makes the solution easy to update and scale. This can be especially useful when managing mergers and acquisitions and bringing new sites onboard. You can more easily integrate and manage service provision in a compliant way.
Intelligent routing boosts performance
Perhaps the biggest advantage of an SD WAN is your granular ability to control data flow. You can prioritise different traffic and create policies around path selection. The SD WAN will then intelligently route traffic based on these policies and priorities to ensure your application and service performance and optimised cost management goals are achieved.
These traffic performance improvements have further performance implications. Employees struggle when communication tools don’t meet their needs, video conferencing isn’t reliable, or applications run poorly. This affects both morale and productivity. This means that improvements to network connectivity and traffic management via your SD WAN solution can, ultimately, contribute to staff engagement and retention as well as your bottom line.
Your customers will also benefit from the more reliable and agile services and operations your SD WAN solution enables.