Several emerging trends in the SD-WAN space

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【51CTO.com Quick Translation】

The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on society, and the value of remote working has been on full display. Many of the organizations least impacted by the COVID-19 lockdowns were those whose IT environments supported employees working from home.

Network technologies such as SD-WAN play an important role in providing this support. Its benefits include overcoming WAN bandwidth limitations, providing reliability and resiliency, and improving the user experience of cloud-based applications.

With these factors in mind, the following emerging trends in the SD-WAN space promise to make WD-WAN an even more valuable resource.

Multi-cloud deployment

From optimizing routing paths to accommodate traffic and bandwidth needs to accelerating traffic between clouds, SD-WAN has proven to be a strong supporter of multi-cloud environments. With the ability to prioritize applications that leverage multiple clouds and enforce specific security and compliance protocols, SD-WAN is well suited to optimize performance and connectivity between clouds.

Another benefit of SD-WAN is the ability to integrate with a wide range of providers, allowing IT managers to select a product mix that fits the organization's specific requirements.

That being said, it is also important to evaluate the medium-term viability of SD-WAN vendors. The market is in a growth phase, so some vendors will succeed and others will fail. This makes it even more important to carefully select your vendor.

Point of Presence (PoP) Integration

Microsoft and Amazon are working to make cloud access faster for their customers. In addition, all leading SD-WAN providers are configuring their products to better integrate with leading cloud platforms. This integration with major providers at the PoP will make the network faster and more secure.

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Enhanced security

The beauty of SD-WAN is that it takes advantage of the abundant bandwidth available on the Internet. However, this is also a potential weakness, as Internet connections can be relatively insecure. Leading SD-WAN providers are working hard to ensure that secure access is an integral part of their platforms.

Encryption and stateful firewalls are increasingly becoming an integral part of products. On the horizon are more protection-oriented features, including intrusion prevention systems, URL and content filtering, malware detection, and DDoS protection. There is also the ability to automate the flow of traffic between network links, as well as allow and deny traffic from certain locations.

Self-healing

SD-WAN alleviates the reliability issues of traditional WANs by allowing network administrators to create policies that shape traffic and ensure reliability.

AI- and machine learning-based algorithms are used to make forwarding decisions on a per-packet basis. They also enable reactive decisions to be made in response to problems. This is expected to reduce the burden of managing and consolidating work in remote offices from a central point.

These developments are driving providers to deploy more autonomous and self-healing SD-WANs.

The arrival of the 5G era

The adoption of 5G opens up a host of new opportunities for SD-WAN. The platform’s mobility and speed are unmatched by anything currently in use, including fiber-based MPLS deployments. While 5G is currently used as a failover solution, the day is fast approaching when 5G will be the backbone and fiber will be the secondary. 5G benefits include direct access and load balancing, security and bandwidth improvements, and the ability to make remote geographic locations easily accessible.

These are just five emerging trends in the SD-WAN space. SD-WAN is quickly becoming an integral part of IT infrastructure, and its management, automation and orchestration capabilities also make it ideal for identifying slowdowns and outages, quickly connecting IoT devices, monitoring network status and unifying management consoles.

In other words, it makes IT professionals' jobs easier.

Original title: Emerging Trends in SD-WAN, author: Ivan Widjaya

[Translated by 51CTO. Please indicate the original translator and source as 51CTO.com when reprinting on partner sites]