The best SD-WAN technology delivers a flexible network connectivity and security solution. It allows you to manage multiple data services from a single management portal and prioritize application traffic based on criticality.
It reduces network complexity, lowers costs, and improves bandwidth efficiency. It also enables you to deploy new branch offices, devices, and cloud resources faster.
Security
As businesses embrace hybrid workforces and multi-cloud environments, they need a new way to connect their branch offices to cloud-based applications and services. The old model of backhauling traffic to the data center for security inspection is costly, adds latency, and impairs application performance. Instead, SD-WAN enables secure, high-performance connections directly over the Internet to eliminate costs and improve speed and reliability.
With SD-WAN, network administrators can manage thousands of routers from a single management interface, simplifying IT operations and allowing them to build and push policies to all devices simultaneously. This centralized visibility will enable them to track and optimize application performances from a single zone, reducing complexity and enabling faster troubleshooting and capacity planning.
Lastly, SD-WAN provides the flexibility to segment networks and implement application-aware routing, limiting any breach’s attack surface and impact. It is imperative as more sensitive applications and data are moved to the cloud. It helps protect business-critical applications from being compromised by a successful attack on less critical domains.
Automation
The ability to automate security functions reduces the attack surface in the network. A key aspect of secure SD-WAN is that it allows enterprises to use inexpensive Internet connections to connect remote branches with their cloud applications. It is accomplished by leveraging a secure private global backbone and converging networking and security functions in a single hardware platform at the branch office.
The traditional model of backhauling traffic to the data center for full security inspection is costly and adds latency, which negatively impacts application performance. Moreover, this approach reduces the visibility of traffic and telemetry like latency and jitter on individual tunnels.
SD-WAN technology should be able to offer transport independence and dynamically route traffic on an application basis. It allows organizations to leverage multiple forms of WAN connectivity, such as MPLS, commodity broadband Internet, or LTE, with a single management console and policy engine. It will allow the WAN to overcome problems like congestion, packet loss, and jitter by identifying and routing around them to ensure consistent application performance. It improves business productivity and satisfaction while reducing costs.
Scalability
Whether your business is growing or expanding into new locations, you need to be able to scale your network seamlessly. SD-WAN can help you do just that by offering many key scalability benefits.
One key feature is application optimization, which improves performance by intelligently prioritizing and routing traffic for each application type, including cloud applications and SaaS services. It helps ensure your critical applications get the bandwidth they need and a high-quality user experience.
Another benefit of SD-WAN is path intelligence, which enables the router to continually monitor all available paths and select the best ones for each application. It helps to eliminate the backhaul penalties that MPLS networks often impose and improves performance.
A third benefit of SD-WAN is centralized management, which allows you to build and deploy policies across all branch routers from a central location. It simplifies management and reduces the time it takes to make changes. It also makes it easier to integrate security, such as a secure web gateway and firewall as a service (FWaaS), into your SD-WAN solution.
Flexibility
The flexibility of SD-WAN allows network managers to make changes to WAN policies remotely. They can add or change security rules, prioritize application traffic based on real-time conditions, and dynamically route data over the best path for a better user experience. They can even handle a complete transport outage without losing data or services.
In addition to providing redundancy for business-critical applications, an SD-WAN can connect employees with secure internet connections from branch offices and remote work locations. That makes it easier for them to access cloud applications and other external sites. And with encryption, it’s easier for employees to send data securely over the Internet.
An SD-WAN’s central control plane enables the provisioning and management of premium network services such as VPN, WAN optimization, security, and more. The customer premises equipment (CPE) deployed at each site can connect to broadband, cellular, or satellite links for added flexibility and performance. These options help reduce costs by eliminating backhaul penalties and improving performance and reliability with multiple application-traffic routes. They also provide flexibility to support a growing business, including integrating new branches and remote workers and optimizing for cloud infrastructure and applications.
Analytics
The centralized control function of an SD-WAN solution allows you to monitor, upgrade, and manage firewalls, routers, and virtual private networks (VPN) through a single interface. This streamlines operations and reduces manual work and maintenance.
Secure connectivity is another key feature of an SD-WAN. By encrypting data as it travels across the WAN, SD-WAN helps prevent hackers from intercepting sensitive information. It also segments your network, so if a breach occurs, the damage is minimized.
An SD-WAN solution with integrated artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) can automatically detect anomalies and correlate events across your network. That makes it easier to pinpoint issues and accelerates troubleshooting time.
An AI-driven SD-WAN also provides granular performance for applications by viewing latency, jitter, and packet loss on each session. Then, it can route sessions to a better-performing link, which improves the user experience and application reliability. It significantly enhances traditional MPLS or appliance-based SD-WAN, providing only visibility at the WAN edge.
