Taking a DIY approach to SD-WAN can require your IT team’s extensive, ongoing networking expertise.
For this reason, many organizations choose a managed service from an experienced vendor that specializes in this technology.
SD-WAN explained that the management portal network administrators use daily to manage it should provide complete, real-time visibility of all network telemetry data.
This is especially important when comparing the advantages of different solutions.
Deployment
Secure connectivity is vital when connecting to multiple locations or working remotely.
With it, employees could gain productivity and experience frustrating problems like lost calls, data loss, and slow performance.
With a software-defined network, you can ensure that your team can get their jobs done in the office or on a business trip by routing traffic over the best available path to the data center.
Unlike traditional MPLS networks, which require expensive, on-premise hardware, a software-defined network can use affordable broadband internet services.
It can also directly connect to any top cloud service providers for better availability and performance.
Network administrators manage SD-WAN devices and configurations.
It collects network telemetry, performs analytics, and pushes device templates to routers in the Control Plane.
These devices advertise routes, policies, and security to the rest of the network.
The global SD-WAN market is expected to grow from $3.4 billion in 2022 to $13.7 billion by 2027.
Management
With so many options available, choosing the right management platform is necessary.
The brains of the SD-WAN system should provide a fully holistic view across all sites.
That way, you can extract maximum value from your WAN resource for optimal Return On Investment (ROI).
The management platform should also allow IT teams to monitor network telemetry data and run analytics to spot issues.
It should also give administrators a granular overview of the network’s usage, providing visibility into application policies defined by VPN, device, location, and user.
A good software-defined network solution allows you to create virtual overlays that bond multiple underlay links, increasing bandwidth capacity and performance.
The solution should also detect problems such as brownouts or soft failures and automatically redirect data traffic to a new path.
This reduces the impact of communication outages and brownouts on users.
It’s also important to keep the firmware and software on your SD-WAN devices updated with bug fixes, performance enhancements, and security features.
Security
SD-WAN enables organizations to leverage new flexibility, agility, and feature velocity levels that are simply impossible with legacy protocols.
This means that IT teams can break free from the constraints of their current network and achieve more cost savings, heightened security, and elevated user confidence than ever before.
DID YOU KNOW?
Hackers can now exploit the fact that your SD-WAN devices are directly connected to the internet and your organization may be exposed to fresh security vulnerabilities.
An advanced SD-WAN solution can dynamically steer application traffic to the best-performing path in real-time, overcoming the latency and packet loss that plague traditional WANs.
This provides a consistent quality of experience (QoE), which is key for modern multimedia applications such as voice, videoconferencing, and gaming.
The most advanced solutions can also support the integration of LTE and 5G, enabling IT to easily connect employees at remote sites using low-cost wireless connectivity that is scalable, reliable, and secure.
By taking advantage of the granular IAM and a single pane of glass management portal, it becomes easier to ensure that all connections are vetted for quality service, performance, and security.
This helps to lower the chances of any risk and prevents costly outages that a simple human error could cause.
Automation
A business-driven SD-WAN combines security, routing, segmentation, WAN optimization, and visibility and control functions on a single platform.
This centralization of network control eliminates siloed appliances that bring additional risk, complexity, and cost to the enterprise.
Zero-touch provisioning templates enable a single configuration change to be pushed out to all devices.
This minimizes human errors and dramatically decreases the time to deploy changes across a large-scale network.
Most basic SD-WAN solutions offer some form of application steering, which automatically directs traffic on an application basis to the optimum route for performance and quality of service.
However, these solutions often need to adapt to the frequent changes in cloud applications.
A business-driven SD-WAN can automatically update and steer SaaS traffic to secure local internet breakout and to alternate routes when underlying networking services suffer.
A centralized management plan that is responsible for software updates and a single-pane-of-glass admin portal is a must for a business-driven SD-WAN.
It simplifies network administration and troubleshooting, decreasing the amount of manual labor required and increasing productivity for IT teams.
