SD-WAN and Operations

Software-defined WAN or SD-WAN is a great example of software redefining the network. SD-WAN technology is the use of software to combine multiple physical networks into a single logical network. By using virtual network technology to hide the physical network overlay, SD-WAN provides a series of intelligent measures that can improve traffic handling and speed up application performance.

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SD-WAN enables organizations to use cheap circuits (such as the Internet) to meet their growing bandwidth needs, making WAN business services cheaper. SD-WAN is popular because it is easy to implement because it does not affect the underlying physical WAN. It also maps new services such as application prioritization, security and management on top of the existing network.

What’s driving SD-WAN adoption?

Enterprises, government agencies, and other organizations have long relied on WANs to connect dispersed users to headquarters for centralized IT resources. They typically deploy dedicated links, such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), from network service providers, including AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink. The rapid growth of WAN traffic continues to put pressure on the communications budgets of many organizations. In addition, the growth of SaaS and other cloud resources has shifted WAN traffic from data centers to the cloud. Organizations with traditional WAN architectures now find that they are short on bandwidth and that backhauling all cloud traffic to a central location creates unacceptable latency for SaaS applications.

Key enterprises that rely on communication with branch offices are rapidly adopting SD-WAN technology to provide reliable, secure and high-speed connections to data centers and cloud-based applications. IT organizations have used SD-WAN technology to establish hybrid WAN structures to maintain existing MPLS connections to achieve secure connectivity from branches to data centers.

What does SD-WAN technology bring to operations and maintenance?

With the economic value of SD-WAN and its advantages in accelerating application performance, organizations are eager to enhance IT operations. SD-WAN helps IT teams prioritize traffic for critical applications. For example, it can identify real-time traffic, such as IP voice and video, and prioritize this traffic to ensure high-quality communications. SD-WAN continuously monitors the status of each WAN link and can intelligently control traffic based on WAN traffic conditions, link status, and application priority. Other benefits of SD-WAN include:

• Easy to deploy: Due to its centralized management capabilities, even non-IT personnel can easily install and deploy SD-WAN in remote branch offices.
• Centralized management: SD-WAN provides IT professionals with improved capabilities to maintain, tune, and troubleshoot WAN links and prioritize applications from a centralized location.
• Security: SD-WAN provides security for using internet links and can often integrate with other third-party security products such as firewalls.
• Reduced operational costs: The business advantage of SD-WAN is that it makes it more flexible for companies to deploy networks. MPLS usually requires customers to purchase expensive edge hardware and sign a regular contract with the operator, but SD-WAN flips the cost model to adapt to service users, providing low-cost commodity items and providing intelligence or orchestration capabilities at the coverage level. It is changing the previous hybrid network cost equation: a US analyst recently estimated that the three-year operating cost of a traditional 250-branch WAN is $1,285,000, which can be reduced to $452,500 through SD-WAN deployment.
• Make full use of network resources and improve local application performance visibility. After the emergence of SD-WAN, many employees will find that they can get more every day because their computing experience will become better after experiencing the pain of high latency, slow database access and unstable video. SD-WAN is improving end-user performance and thus productivity because it abstracts a control layer from existing physical networks and components. Doing so allows CIOs to leverage network investments and cloud applications and improve local application performance visibility from a central control point.

For example, a pharmaceutical company implemented SD-WAN to more intelligently route data across its wide area network. It had been plagued by variable bandwidth around the world, which adversely affected its online training facilities. The company used SD-WAN to eliminate jitter for VoIP and video applications, no longer experienced packet loss, and achieved a 25% improvement in network efficiency. In addition, a global law firm used SD-WAN to eliminate latency for business-critical video and case management applications and enabled more efficient “thin client computing” around the world, thereby optimizing casework billing.

Who uses SD-WAN?

Various organizations around the world are actively deploying SD-WAN technology. In the past, most SD-WAN installations were mainly used in large North American organizations with large IT resources and a large number of branch offices, especially in the retail and financial sectors.

But as the technology has developed, a large number of resellers can now deploy SD-WAN relatively easily for many organizations to improve application performance in branch offices. Industries that need to deploy SD-WAN are financial services, restaurants, retail, healthcare, manufacturing and government. Large organizations with more remote workers and branch offices are more interested in SD-WAN than medium-sized enterprises or organizations with only one or two offices. An organization's requirements for SD-WAN depend on the company's size, location and vertical industry. For example, the deployment of SD-WAN in healthcare and finance is more concerned with security and compliance. Organizations with highly mobile employees will emphasize the ease of deployment and centralized management capabilities of SD-WAN.

How to deploy SD-WAN

When choosing a partner to help deploy SD-WAN technology, IT organizations can choose from a variety of providers. Large organizations with extensive IT resources may evaluate, deploy, and maintain SD-WAN technology from remote or branch office locations. Organizations can consult traditional network channel partners to recommend and deploy SD-WAN. In either case, organizations can choose a variety of ways to pay for SD-WAN technology. For example, purchasing a physical device, purchasing a perpetual license, or licensing software on a regular basis.

IT organizations looking to outsource SD-WAN installation and management can find a variety of managed SD-WAN service offerings from managed service providers (MSPs) that offer their own WAN services or source network resources from other service providers.

SD-WAN Technology Vendors

The number of SD-WAN vendors has exploded over the past five years, with at least three dozen vendors now on the market. The SD-WAN vendor lineup includes technology startups such as CloudGenix, VeloCloud, Versa Networks, and Viptela, as well as WAN optimization vendors that have added SD-WAN technology. These include Citrix, Riverbed, Silver Peak, and Talari. Cisco added SD-WAN capabilities to its branch routers, but is now leaning toward Viptela's technology. Aryaka and Cato Networks combine their respective technologies with global business points to provide SD-WAN services for distributed organizations. Cradlepoint provides 4G LTE wireless routers, and SD-WAN technology lays the foundation for mobile use cases.

Large technology vendors interested in SD-WAN include Hewlett Packard Enterprise Aruba, VMware (acquired VeloCloud), Dell and Nokia. The technology has a highly distributed market share, with dozens of vendors currently occupying these markets. However, mergers and acquisitions of companies will lead to new market entrants and changes in ownership.

SD-WAN pricing varies widely, depending on the amount of bandwidth required at the branch office, the feature set and the connectivity method, such as software licensing, appliance, subscription and monthly fees.

SD-WAN Technology Trends

In a highly competitive market, SD-WAN technology is evolving rapidly with the continued release of new product features and expansion of technology partnerships. For example, SD-WAN vendors continue to strengthen support for multi-tenancy, provide better security, and improve centralized management capabilities. Key areas of SD-WAN technology improvement include:

• WAN optimization: SD-WAN vendors typically include traditional WAN optimization capabilities as a standard or optional part of their feature set.
• Unified communications prioritization: SD-WAN can identify and prioritize voice and video traffic, measure its quality and provide corrective actions.
• Enhanced routing: SD-WAN technology now supports enhanced routing capabilities, including Border Gateway Protocol. This enables organizations to remove routers from certain branch locations.
• Centralized management: SD-WAN providers are improving management and orchestration capabilities, enabling IT to quickly adjust application performance.
• Security: SD-WAN technology now integrates basic firewall capabilities, often using traffic identification to whitelist cloud connections, such as SaaS applications. SD-WAN vendors have stepped up integration of security products such as next-generation firewalls, unified threat management, and antivirus protection.
• SD-branch: Many SD-WAN vendors have made the migration to software-defined branch architecture part of their roadmap. SD-branch capabilities include SD-WAN, routing, network security and networking such as Wi-Fi. It provides IT agility, reduces hardware costs and simplifies operations in an integrated branch architecture.

SD-WAN is a proven technology that improves WAN bandwidth economics, accelerates application performance, and simplifies branch network operations. Distributed organizations across all verticals should investigate how to improve business operations at their remote locations through SD-WAN technology or managed services. IT professionals can choose SD-WAN products from a wide range of vendors, including startups, mid-sized to large networking companies, and MSPs. The competitive market environment is driving continued innovation in security, routing, application prioritization, and management.