Six advantages of deploying SD-WAN

With the increase in data analysis, media traffic, storage requirements and data backup, more and more data is being transmitted between data centers, cloud environments, branch offices and other remote locations. The growth in traffic requires the performance of wide area networks (WANs) and the applications running on them to be optimized. As traffic steadily rises, network administrators can also see increasing latency in sensitive data transmission. WAN and application performance optimization solutions that provide the scalability and throughput required for traffic transmission have become an inevitable choice for enterprises.

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Use technologies such as data deduplication, compression, and other protocol optimizations to optimize performance, including improving bandwidth capacity, network latency, protocols, and overall network traffic monitoring and management. At the same time, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology is becoming a new network approach that can provide a variety of performance and cost advantages, including end-to-end network visibility and feedback to improve transmission efficiency. The technology also creates a path from proprietary hardware devices to SD-WANs, which are agile and programmable, allowing enterprises to keep up with the pace of IT innovation.

SD-WAN Definition

SD-WANs offer the benefits associated with software-defined networking (SDN), but in the wide area network. By automating network deployment and management, SDN and SD-WAN virtualize resources to improve performance, accelerate service delivery, and increase availability while reducing total cost of ownership. SD-WANs operate by measuring basic network traffic metrics such as latency, packet loss, jitter, and availability. With this data, SD-WANs are able to proactively respond to real-time network conditions and select the best path for each packet. In many cases, SD-WAN adopters can take advantage of proprietary features of solutions provided by vendors. For example, Riverbed's SteelHead RiOS can accelerate SSL traffic over the WAN. SD-WANs are typically integrated into an enterprise's existing WAN, and one advantage of SD-WAN overlays is that they can support MPLS as well as hybrid WANs, providing improvements regardless of the type of network infrastructure. SD-WAN adoption is growing rapidly because the technology offers a wide range of operational and financial benefits, including:

Agility

SD-WAN routers can combine the bandwidth of multiple WAN connections. Enterprises using SD-WAN can add or delete WAN connections on demand, and can also combine cellular and fixed line connections. Under the premise of SD-WAN, bandwidth can be flexibly increased or decreased according to changes in demand. SD-WAN technology can also enable WAN services to be quickly deployed to remote sites without the need for IT staff to deploy them.

cost

Internet links are typically much cheaper than carrier-grade MPLS connections, which are often subject to provisioning times and expensive prices. SD-WAN technology enables enterprises to effectively utilize all available network connections to meet all their needs without having to worry about maintaining idle backup links.

Safety

SD-WAN can be used to encrypt traffic during WAN transmission and improve network security by slicing the network, which can minimize the loss in the event of an attack. SD-WAN can also help IT administrators continuously monitor the amount and type of traffic on the network and quickly detect attacks.

reliability

MPLS links tend to provide high reliability packet delivery, while Internet uplinks often fail. To compensate for this problem, many enterprises that adopt SD-WAN choose to order multiple Internet links from different providers to ensure 99.99% availability in the event of a link failure.

performance

The application of SD-WAN technology enables the Internet to create secure, high-performance connections, eliminating the backhaul caused by MPLS networks. This allows SD-WAN to deliver business applications in a cost-effective manner while optimizing Software as a Service (SaaS) and other cloud-based services. The technology also improves IT efficiency at branch offices by enabling automation and provides reliable, low-cost links for IoT projects.

Enterprises with distributed architectures and those that are adopting IoT technologies should evaluate SD-WAN solutions based on ease of use, manageability, the ability to integrate with existing MPLS networks, and intelligent automatic adjustment of traffic flows.