Why SD-WAN?
Meeting Business Needs with SD-WANs
Originally, enterprise managers did not foresee the explosion of bandwidth demands that would be placed on their organizations. IT staffs are struggling to this day in order to meet those demands while managing company infrastructure. The software-defined approach will be the future of networks, as operating and maintaining legacy networks are becoming more cost-prohibitive for businesses to take on.
In addition, legacy networks are unable to keep pace with cloud computing technology. The rigidness of underlying hardware that comprises these networks makes it difficult for them to be responsive to business needs. Most of the equipment of the traditional WAN architecture consists of dated routers and switches that would be considered archaic in today’s computing environment. Today business enterprises need something that will be adaptive to organizational policies and requirements.
Many of the applications that are used within traditional WANs lack bandwidth awareness, and would usually require additional layers of software in order to give personnel the necessary monitoring functions to track and analyze metrics on how network bandwidth is being used. They are also no longer hosted exclusively within the confines of data centers but are now living with on-premise data centers, private and public clouds, and software as a service (SaaS) solutions such as Dropbox, Office 365, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com.
Why Are SD-WANs Catching On?
SD-WANs are catching on due to the needs of business enterprises asking for a technical solution to address problems that have been prevalent in legacy networks. Traditional WANs are often set up with layers of underlying hardware that makes them difficult to manage. The hardware limits also make it difficult for businesses to scale. Companies have begun to realize the limitations of their older networks, and are looking for solutions to meet increasing business demands.
As organizations grew more decentralized over the years, their reliance on being able to conduct work remotely also grew. Remote teams all over the world need networks with reliable connectivity in order to share products with their products in order to get the job done. They will need to be able to share and complete tasks with others over vast distances.
Originally, months of planning was required in order to acquire and install equipment across different sites. Traditional routers and switches have to be individually configured through command-line interfaces utilizing standard templates. These templates had the flaw of not being error free and had to be inspected very closely to ensure that individual configurations aligned correctly with the rest of the network.
The fact that traditional WANs were not cloud-friendly, to begin with, makes it difficult for enterprises to run virtualization-style networks. Legacy router-centric models that backhauled traffic from the headquarters to branch offices often created latency issues, which results in negative user experience. Employees within the organization often report that their apps work better at home than in the office.
The software-defined solution makes it simpler for organizations to deploy and configure networks within a short period rapidly. It also frees up bandwidth and doesn’t exclusively rely on just one connection to handle enterprise needs.
SD-WAN for businesses will soon be the norm. It is estimated within the next five years that around 60-70% of businesses will be replacing MPLS circuits with software-defined WANs.
Why Businesses Need SD-WAN
Businesses are looking for networks that are more malleable to their businesses. SD-WANs only encompass 3% but is gaining traction due to the immense value that they provide, along with significant cost savings. However, they are still reliant on dedicated MPLS circuits, which also includes switches and routers that pipe back to the SD-WAN vendors. This makes implementing any changes in network configuration a lengthy and expensive affair.
SD-WAN offers the ability to utilize multiple connections into a singular platform, offering failover capabilities that do not exist within traditional WANs. That means that anything as simple as a brownout should not be able to interrupt the current session. It gives users the ability to leverage these connections and connect to any application.
Since business entities are heavily attached to their applications, they will need a singular platform in order to monitor and manage everything that runs through the network. SD-WANs offer a unified dashboard that allows for monitoring of network traffic. Combined with artificial intelligence, it helps enterprises to be able to manage their networks smartly.
Some of the benefits that can be derived from SD-WAN include:
- Improving the security posture of the enterprise while reducing threats at the same time
- Simplify the architecture of WAN branching
- Reduce 90 percent of WAN costs for an organization
The benefits of SD-WAN can’t be denied. Since cloud technology is becoming more prevalent, there will be a growing need to change over to the SD architecture in the coming years.
