Is SD-WAN coming to take away the jobs of operations and maintenance personnel?

Nowadays, SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) is gradually emerging in enterprise WAN applications, but many operation and maintenance personnel think that their jobs are coming to them. In fact, this is obviously a misunderstanding, and there are several misunderstandings to avoid.

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Is SD-WAN taking over jobs?

SD-WAN is a service formed by applying software-defined technology to wide area network scenarios. It simplifies management and reduces investment by centralizing management and providing business policy processes and security. With the surge in the number of applications and IoT device connections, enterprise bandwidth is increasingly stretched. In addition, some employees cannot resist the temptation of live football games, online games, and video downloads during work hours, resulting in a continuous increase in network bandwidth usage.

At this time, the deployment and application of SD-WAN technology can not only automate decision-making and centralize operations, but also change the visibility of network traffic, and can easily resolve bandwidth congestion, while also significantly reducing the number of network management personnel. Faced with the arrival of SD-WAN, some network engineers have expressed concerns about their positions. But in essence, SD-WAN is still just a tool that requires the management and control of operation and maintenance personnel, and will not directly take away jobs. Of course, it will also force operation and maintenance engineers to improve their own level to a new level from the side.

Is SD-WAN too complex?

In addition to the above misunderstandings, some network engineers also expressed reluctance to adopt SD-WAN because it would force them to learn some complex, new programming languages. This is also a misunderstanding. SD-WAN does not require you to learn some new programming languages. Because SD-WAN sits on top of multiple WAN links and uses software-driven policies to automatically select the best data transmission mechanism for each application, it virtually reduces management complexity.

Once the hardware is installed, it's quick to configure. What awaits you is to configure and check everything to see how it goes... and then wait and wait. With SD-WAN, you can see the entire network and reduce the burden of management and control. Of course, if you are used to command-line driving and setting up a network on each device at the same time, you will make mistakes and spend a lot of time eliminating mistakes, because human errors are the biggest obstacles in work and life, not software.

Is SD-WAN too expensive?

As a SaaS solution, SD-WAN is relatively cheap to invest in compared to a customized DIY setup. Before adopting, decision makers need to ask themselves: Can the team do this work themselves using a custom model, or should the enterprise sign a service plan? In fact, once users are familiar with SD-WAN and can set it up correctly, it can be turned into a DIY model.

Moreover, because SD-WAN can use flexible software definition combined with general IT hardware equipment to provide low-cost, efficient traffic management and intelligent path selection WAN layout services, it can effectively make up for the high cost of MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching). The key is that the earlier the enterprise adopts relatively advanced technology, the more it can take the initiative and increase the value for the enterprise.

Is SD-WAN Insecure?

Statistics show that more than 50% of respondents believe that their companies will be directly affected by SD-WAN service security vulnerabilities in the next two years. About 20% said that this problem will break out in the next five years. One respondent even admitted that his company has already encountered related security threats.

In fact, SD-WAN can reduce the time required to set up secure communication link services. SD-WAN can create secure connections for enterprise employees in minutes instead of days or even weeks. After authenticating with the application through the network, employee voice, messaging, video collaboration, file sharing, etc. are managed with the help of policies, so that employees can have continuous office capabilities. And the firewall of SD-WAN helps ensure that IT administrators gain security and the ability to identify thousands of applications on the network. This simplifies the process of defining each configuration and policy, allowing IT administrators to effectively implement control.

Conclusion

As traditional WAN connections cannot keep up with the current broadband business needs of enterprises, more and more financial institutions and retail enterprises have begun to pay attention to SD-WAN technology. However, facing this emerging technology, many enterprises and IT teams still have misunderstandings and fears about it, which has negatively affected the deployment of SD-WAN. But as the above analysis shows, this is not the case. The SD-WAN era has already begun.