We’ve come a long way through the journey of Wide Area Networking. From Leased lines to Frame Relay, from MPLS to Internet VPNs, it was high time for disruption.
Just as virtualization revolutionized Data Centre and Cloud infrastructure, it has now also changed the game when it comes to Wide Area Networks (WANs).
Abstracting the data plane from the control plane in SD-WAN, has provided several benefits over traditional router based & MPLS WANs.
These are some of the reasons why you need to consider SD-WAN for your business:
1. Rapid Deployment
- One of the biggest problems with MPLS networks, apart from high-cost, is provisioning lead-times, often measured in months rather than days, as well as overall architecture complexity.
- Rapid Deployment is a key benefit of SD‐WAN
- SD‐WAN networks are easy to deploy and manage using Cloud Orchestration and Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) to spin up new networks and sites rapidly
- Routing complexity has all but disappeared, replaced with point and click intuitive GUIs
- SD-WAN can leverage readily available broadband Internet links such as NBN & Ethernet
- SD-WAN coupled with 4G/LTE options make for even more rapid deployments, in some cases, within hours, not days.
2. Cost Benefits
- SD-WAN offers considerable savings over traditional router based & MPLS networksLeveraging Broadband services rather than expensive MPLS circuits
- Leveraging Broadband services rather than expensive MPLS circuits
- Resiliency & High-Availability provided by multiple low-cost broadband services with low or best effort SLAs
- Straight-forward to deploy and manage using Cloud Orchestration requiring less customer resources
- Greater visibility and reporting of network and application performance
- Direct internet breakout using Secure Web Gateways (SWG) and branch-branch communications avoid tromboning and constant scaling of trunks at HQ & DCs.
3. Flexible Architecture
- SD-WANs can easily be designed with different architectures:
- Fully Meshed
- Partial Mesh
- Multiple Hubs/DCs
- Direct Internet Breakout
- Centralized SWG
- Branch-Branch (Dynamic)
- SD‐WAN optimizes networks to easily and quickly connect to cloud-based & SaaS applications. It eliminates the backhaul penalties of traditional MPLS networks and provides secure, high‐performance connections to the cloud.
4. High-Performance & Resiliency
- An exciting benefit of SD-WAN technology is the ability to leverage low-cost Broadband Internet links to achieve high-availability and real-time network performance & QoS
- SD-WAN technology offers packet-based traffic steering allowing traffic flow decisions based on Business Policies for different applications and services
- Link Conditioning features such as Forward Error Correction and Dynamic Multi-Path Optimization to combat high-packet loss (in some cases >20%)
- These technologies combined allow MPLS like performance using Broadband services at a fraction of the cost
- Voice, Video & Real-Time applications
5. Management, Reporting & Visibility
- Cloud Management & Orchestration allows:
- Point and Click configuration
- GUI
- Monitoring & Alerting
- Scheduled & on-the fly updates
- Rapid Provisioning (ZTP)
- Reporting & Visibility
- Deep application & traffic visibility
- Network performance (packet-loss, latency, utilization etc)
- Custom Report generation
Wevo partners with all the major SD-WAN technology vendors in the market, and has extensive expertise in design, deployment and management for SD-WANs of all sizes. If you’d like to discuss SD-WAN options for your business in person with no obligation, please reach out to the Wevo team.
