That's it? This is the SD-WAN you always mentioned to me?

What is SD-WAN?

SD-WAN is a software-defined approach to managing WANs.

Key benefits include:

• Reduce costs with transport independence for MPLS, 4G/5G LTE, and other connection types.
• Improve application performance and increase agility.
• Optimize user experience and efficiency for Software as a Service (SaaS) and public cloud applications.
• Simplify operations with automation and cloud-based management.

Why use SD-WAN now?

Traditional WAN

The traditional WAN (Wide Area Network) function is to connect users in a branch office or campus to applications hosted on servers in the data center. Typically, dedicated MPLS circuits are used to help ensure secure and reliable connections. This does not work in a cloud-centric world.

Today's IT Challenges Times have changed. As enterprises adopt SaaS and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) applications across multiple clouds, IT is realizing that user application experiences are poor. That's because WANs designed for a different era aren't ready for the unprecedented explosion in WAN traffic that cloud adoption brings. This traffic leads to management complexity, unpredictable application performance, and data vulnerabilities.

Additionally, opening the enterprise to the Internet and the cloud exposes significant threats and compliance issues. Protecting the critical assets of an enterprise is extremely challenging when a diverse workforce, including employees, partners, contractors, suppliers, and guests, accesses applications. Enabling broadband over the WAN makes security requirements more stringent, creating challenges for IT in balancing user experience, security, and complexity.

New WAN

New business models are driving the need for new network models.

SD-WAN solves current IT challenges. This new approach to network connectivity can reduce operating costs and improve resource utilization for multi-site deployments. Network administrators can use bandwidth more efficiently and can help ensure high performance for critical applications without sacrificing security or data privacy.

What are the benefits of SD-WAN?

Traditional WAN architectures are limited to the enterprise, branch offices, and data centers. Once organizations adopt cloud-based applications in the form of SaaS and IaaS, their WAN architectures experience an explosion in traffic accessing applications distributed around the world.

These changes have multiple impacts on IT. SaaS application performance issues can impact employee productivity. WAN expenses can increase with inefficient use of dedicated and backup circuits. IT departments fight a complex battle every day to connect multiple types of users with multiple types of devices to multiple cloud environments.

With SD-WAN, IT can provide routing, threat protection, efficient offloading of expensive circuits, and simplified WAN network management. Business benefits can include the following:

Better application experience:

• High availability and predictable service for all critical enterprise applications
• Multiple active-active hybrid links for all network scenarios
• Dynamically route application traffic for efficient delivery and improved user experience with application-aware routing
• Improved operating expenses by replacing expensive Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) services with more affordable, flexible broadband, including secure VPN connections

Safer:

• Application-aware policy with end-to-end segmentation and real-time access control
• Integrated threat protection in the right places
• Secure traffic across broadband Internet and into the cloud
• Distribute security to branch offices and remote endpoints using NGFW, DNS security, and NGAV

Optimized Cloud Connection:

• Seamlessly extend your WAN to multiple public clouds
• Real-time optimized performance for Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, and other major SaaS applications
• Optimized workflows for cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure

Simplified Management:

• Single, centralized, cloud-delivered management dashboard for configuring and managing WAN, cloud, and security
• Template-based zero-touch provisioning for all locations: branch, campus, and cloud
• Detailed reporting of application and WAN performance for business analysis and bandwidth forecasting

MPLS and SD-WAN

SD-WAN evolved from MPLS technology, which has powered private connectivity for more than two decades. In many ways, SD-WAN can be viewed as a software abstraction of MPLS technology for a wider range of scenarios: it brings secure, private connectivity that is link- and provider-agnostic and cloud-aware. While MPLS handles failure scenarios through backup links, SD-WAN handles them through centralized policy-based, real-time traffic control.

Additionally, because SD-WAN unifies the entire WAN backbone, it can provide comprehensive network analytics on a global scale. This was not possible before due to disparate infrastructure and policies.

SDN and SD-WAN

SD-WAN can be thought of as SDN for WANs. Arguably, it represents the most popular and widely deployed use case for SDN. The SDN model became popular by abstracting the network infrastructure in data centers and other parts of the enterprise perimeter.

SD-WAN plays a similar role but requires abstracting infrastructure elements that vary widely in terms of link types, providers, and geography. Because it crosses enterprise boundaries, it also requires a strong security component.