Pros & Cons of SD-WAN

SD-WANs are meant to be the next evolution of networking technology. Of course, they are not without their flaws. They aim to offer three key things to customers that help keep their businesses going: reliability, security, and quality of service. Legacy networks are limited in all three areas, as they were never conceived to be virtualization-friendly. This forced enterprises to do away with older technologies and adopt the software-defined approach as the way to do business.

Customers will need to be thoroughly aware that although the SD architecture is aimed to increase network agility and responsiveness, they are not the catch-all solution as standards will still need to be maintained. If you are considering adopting the software-defined approach to design your architecture, you should consider the pros and cons:

Pros & Cons of SD-WAN

Pros

SD-WANs will soon be the future of networks as we know it. Enterprises are quickly adopting public clouds in order to meet operational requirements and to satisfy their customer base. They provide numerous advantages for organizations including:

  • Makes network operation easier via WAN optimization; made possible via cloud-based management and automation. Centralization of network control occurs through the use of an SD network controller. The controller makes it easier to implement enterprise-level policies at the headquarters at subsidiary branch offices. Compression, tokenization, application proxies, caching, deduplication and other techniques are utilized to make the WAN behave like data is moving across a LAN.
  • Improves business applications and makes them agile compared to older architectures. Administrators will have the ability to determine the minimum and maximum bandwidth limits to better utilize available network bandwidth and efficiently prioritize apps.
  • Optimizes user experience and efficiency for cloud and SaaS applications.
  • Reduces costs, gives the network’s independence across 3G/4G LTE networks, MPLS, and so on.
  • Common tasks such as provisioning and configurations are automated within the network.
  • Improves traffic management for organizations. The unified dashboard gives system administrators metrics on network performance.
  • Includes next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) with malware protection to defend against malicious cyber threats. Stateful inspections of data packets occur as they reach the perimeter of the firewall.
  • Vendor service-level agreements provide guarantees of consistent user experience within the network enterprise.

Pros & Cons of SD-WAN

Cons

Like any other network, SD-WANs are not perfect and come with their own flaws. These are some of the cons you will need to consider:

  • SD-WANs have not been fully adopted yet. Businesses currently still rely on old connections in order to keep internal and external operations ongoing. This is compensated by adopting the hybrid solution.
  • There is no on-site security functionality. Security standards will still need to be implemented to ensure that your network remains protected and not exposed to outside threats. One simple data breach could compromise the entire enterprise.
  • IT staffs will have to be heavily relied on in order to deploy and maintain this technical solution. If they are unable to do so, calling in outside help will be an expensive endeavor.
  • SD-WAN networks are immune to slow performance.
  • There is no true end of end QoS if using just SD-WAN provisions only.
  • The vendors of SD-WAN tend to vary and often doesn’t meet what is originally envisioned for software-based networking.
  • SD-WAN forwarding appliances offer Ethernet connections to interface with your WAN and LAN, but not traditional WAN circuits. If a time-division multiplexer is necessary to support your network, you’ll need to retain your existing WAN router in order to support your SD architecture.

Whether you’re working in the office or at home, SD-WAN is geared to supporting your business needs no matter where you are. Cost savings and security are offered in abundance, along with a granular quality of service. IT teams will need to take into account the entirety of their network infrastructure before committing to transition to SD-WAN.