SD-WAN

What Does SD-WAN Stands For?

SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide-Area-Network, and it leverages the corporate WAN as well as multi cloud connectivity to deliver high speed application performance.

Pre SD-WAN Era

In the past, organizations purchased and operated their own servers to run applications and store business data, that came with an upfront capital expense to run the servers. There was also a team of technicians that were needed to be hired for the machines to operate. This was a big expense to most businesses, though it was worthwhile as it gave them a competitive advantage over their competitors. One early challenge was to make these servers available to various geographically distributed networks, called local area networks or LAN's.

Early WAN solutions

WAN is a computer network that spans a large geographic area and typically consists of two or more LAN's. For example, if Acme Corporation spanned multiple cities and continents, each with their own local area network, how would they connect these LAN's so that someone in the London office could connect to a database server in Singapore? Traditionally, businesses connected their LAN's by a way of a single, dedicated server provider. Though expensive, they could control and secure this connection while providing access to critical resources. However, this method had limitations. The single point of connectivity was subject to frequent outages, which made it unreliable. In addition, because there was an increasing demand to host business applications in the cloud, known as SaaS, higher latency became an issue. SaaS applications like Salesforce, Dropbox, and Google Apps, and a greater reliance on video and voice conferencing, contributed to the congestion. Business began to seek more affordable, faster Ethernet connections. The trend toward increasing hybrid connections, and the growth of cloud application to support underlying intelligent business decisions, led to the first generation of SD-WAN.

SD-WAN Gen One

Business added multiple dedicated carrier links and load-balancing per application traffic, based on how much bandwidth was available. Although this approach seemed to solve a few bandwidth issues, it added yet another product to solve. These point products escalate complexity to the network infrastructure. Duo to the network using multiple vendors, which don't always sync with each other, it became a nightmare for IT and Network Administrators to manage. Still, the first generation of SD-WAN solved a pressing issue: its basic load-balancing techniques allowed the network to make applications-intelligent business decisions on hybrid WAN links. Accurate application identification, visibility into network performance, and reliable switchover of application traffic between best performing WAN links pivoted SD-WAN as the most sought-after WAN technology across all business. However, security remained a serious concern for business. Even after SD-WAN adoption, businesses kept sending all their sensitive and critical application traffic to data centers for security purpose, or were forced to install sophisticated firewall solution to inspect their direct internet access. This has made the network even more complex, making management harder.

Today SD-WAN

Today, in secure SD-WAN, intuitive business policy workflows make it easy to configure and manage the application needs with the flexibility of prioritizing business-critical applications. A centralized management console provides single, point of view, simplifying management. Overall, positive outcomes of a secure SD-WAN solution are simplification, consolidation and cost reduction while providing much needed optimal application performance and better user experience. SaaS, and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) applications run-time analytics and telemetry to help IT workers monitor the network.