Backhauling data from remote offices to a central data center can be time-consuming and costly. SD-WAN provides a software-centric process that optimizes access to cloud applications and remote work sites.
It also enables administrators to easily monitor the traffic and performance of SaaS and other bandwidth-heavy applications. This visibility can help administrators proactively avoid outages and other issues by providing the best available link for each application.
Scalability
Traditionally, IT teams had to deploy and set up new links between branch offices and headquarters via MPLS circuits that are expensive and slow to provision. The basics of SD-WAN use programmable network devices you can set up remotely and dynamic best path routing to cut costs, increase agility, and improve performance.
The software-driven approach means your network can monitor for problems such as circuit outages, congestion, and other factors that could slow response times. It can then route traffic around these areas for better performance and faster access to cloud applications.
With an SD-WAN solution, your branches can connect directly to the data center, the cloud, or to Software as a Service (SaaS) applications with secure local internet breakout – speeding up application performance and improving remote work experience. In addition, intelligent application-aware routing helps you prioritize traffic, ensuring mission-critical apps get the bandwidth they need while optimizing others to reduce latency and packet loss. It makes it easier for distributed employees to complete work at home or while traveling on business, reducing productivity losses.
Flexibility
SD-WAN enables direct connectivity to cloud and SaaS applications without backhauling traffic over the WAN, eliminating latency issues and improving application performance. It also provides application prioritization and security policies, ensuring that each application class receives the appropriate quality of service.
A centralized management portal lets you monitor network connections and traffic enabling you to identify and resolve issues with a single click quickly. It is a significant benefit over traditional router-centric models that require manual configuration changes at each branch office.
The ability to connect sites with multiple connectivity methods, including MPLS, broadband internet, and LTE/4G, enables you to reduce costs by avoiding expensive leased lines. It also allows you to flexibly allocate bandwidth between different network connection methods as conditions change.
For example, if you’re deploying a new site and a WAN circuit is down, it can quickly switch to broadband. Similarly, you can scale capacity as business requirements increase with SD-WAN’s scalable connectivity. This flexibility is also possible in remote locations where moving to a higher broadband speed can improve connectivity and performance.
Security
SD-WAN allows enterprises to use public internet connections to offload traffic that isn’t business critical – reducing bandwidth usage on private MPLS circuits and improving the user experience for SaaS and cloud applications. It also supports a dual connectivity strategy using public and private network services at each site, ensuring that business-critical applications always have low latency.
Security is another area where SD-WAN offers benefits. Rather than having separate firewalls at each branch office, an SD-WAN network connects all locations to HQ’s secure VPN connection. It reduces the number of devices that need to be managed, increasing security and eliminating the possibility of human error.
Additionally, many SD-WAN solutions provide a next-generation firewall built into the device to add an extra layer of security and eliminate the need for additional hardware. It provides greater visibility into the network and can help speed up troubleshooting, which is often a bottleneck in IT operations. It also makes IT automating policies propagated from a centralized controller easier. It simplifies network management and speeds up the time to deploy new capabilities like zero-touch provisioning.
Availability
With WAN management being one of the most costly aspects of network operations, SD-WAN reduces costs and improves agility by proactively responding to real-time network conditions. By deploying business-driven policies that respond to network conditions, a single centralized console enables changes to be made on the fly for 10s or even 1000s of locations.
For example, when traffic destined for the cloud goes to a remote location, an SD-WAN can automatically send the traffic directly via the internet to your preferred cloud service providers bypassing your internal LAN. It is a significant benefit that can reduce IT costs, increase performance and reliability, and improve security.
An SD-WAN can also optimize applications sensitive to latency, packet loss, or jitter. Using session-centric performance monitoring, an AI-driven SD-WAN solution can automatically detect and monitor the performance of each application. This information is used to make decisions to route each application session to a link that will provide the best performance. Similarly, if the WAN connection fails, the sessions can be immediately rerouted to an alternative link.
Efficiency
In addition to cost savings from reduced hardware and personnel requirements, SD-WAN provides many efficiency benefits. Its dynamic path selection improves the quality of service (QoS) by ensuring mission-critical applications, such as videoconferencing or inventory management, receive priority over less crucial applications. It also optimizes bandwidth by automatically routing traffic over the best available connections, whether MPLS, broadband, or LTE.
Unlike traditional WANs, which often require hardware in every branch office, an SD-WAN solution can manage multiple connectivity types from a single platform. It reduces equipment and maintenance costs and can improve WAN performance by increasing last-mile availability.
The ability to centrally configure application network settings, security, and other factors — like logging-as-a-service access – is another critical aspect of an efficient SD-WAN solution. With a quality-managed provider, these changes can be made in real-time and instantly pushed to 10s, 100s, or even 1000s of devices across an organization’s network, greatly simplifying the management process. It can further help to increase productivity and business uptime, even when a network connection is slow.
