Smarter, faster,
more secure connectivity.
With traditional WAN solutions, organizations suffer a less than ideal quality of experience and have a hard time delivering high-performance bandwidth for critical applications. Since legacy WAN architectures rely on packet routing, they lack in-depth application visibility.
Traditional WAN was designed based on multiple devices stacked on each other in the branch office, with expensive and limited bandwidth MPLS links connecting them — leading to “data-center dependency” with heavy performance penalties.
It means complex infrastructure and unpredictable application performance, inability to prioritize, manage and secure — slowing down your business.
According to Aryaka’s “State of the WAN” report, time to activate a new site globally is mostly between a week and a month (47% of responses). In 28% of cases it takes more than a month. Slow, expensive, inefficient…
These requirements — improve security, guarantee reliability and performance, increase bandwidth, improve cloud access, manage application performance, faster deployments and reduce complexity — led to the creation of SD-WAN.
A Software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is a virtual WAN architecture that abstracts software from hardware, creating a virtualized network overlay while using any combination of transport services — including MPLS, LTE and/or broadband.
This overlay intelligently identifies applications on the very first packet and monitors the real-time performance characteristics of the underlying networks. Based on configuration policies, it automatically selects the optimum network for each application.
A simplified and centrally managed SD-WAN architecture lowers both CAPEX and OPEX. Bringing a new branch online is easy and can be done in just a few minutes. No specialized IT expertise is required on premise.
In technical terms, SD-WAN abstracts the Control Plane from the Data Plane. It reduces recurring network costs, offers network-wide control and visibility, and simplifies technology with zero-touch deployment and centralized management.
- The SD-WAN edge is where the network endpoints reside — a branch office, remote data center, or cloud platform.
- The SD-WAN Orchestrator is the virtualized manager, overseeing traffic and applying policy and protocol set by operators.
- The SD-WAN Controller centralizes management, enabling operators to see the network through a single pane of glass.
Traditional WANs based on conventional routers are not cloud-friendly. They require backhauling all traffic from branch offices to a hub data center, impairing application performance. And given that 93% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, this is a critical factor.
The ROI of SD-WAN is dramatic and immediate. You can now augment or even replace MPLS connections with broadband internet services to lower WAN costs dramatically.
| Requirement | MPLS | SD-WAN |
|---|---|---|
| ↑ High importance | ||
| Control / reduce ICT costs | ~ | ✓ |
| Provide high security | ✓ | ~ |
| Guarantee reliability and performance (SLAs) | ✓ | ~ |
| Cope with high bandwidth / scalability | ✓ | ✓ |
| Medium importance — Flexibility | ||
| Connectivity to cloud services | ✗ | ✓ |
| Managing bandwidth requirements (dynamic load balancing, BoD) | ✗ | ✓ |
| Managing applications’ performance | ✗ | ✓ |
| ↓ Lower importance | ||
| Centralized and automated management / better visibility | ✗ | ✓ |
| Faster deployments, especially new remote sites | ✗ | ✓ |
| Reduce complexity for local branches and remote users | ✗ | ✓ |
| Improve reliability in exotic locations | ~ | ✓ |
| ✓ Well / often met ~ Partially / sometimes met ✗ Not met | ||
SD-WAN makes leveraging different transport methods easy, enabling high-availability configurations that reduce single points of failure. Of course, this doesn’t mean SD-WAN replaces MPLS — it depends on the right usage and specific scenarios.
- Increase business productivity and user satisfaction
- Automatic path selection
- Improve security and reduce threats
- Simplify branch WAN architecture
- Reduce WAN costs
- End-to-end encryption
- End-to-end visibility
Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) — configurations and policies are programmed once and pushed to all branch locations without manual programming. It eliminates the need to send specialized IT resources to branches and reduces human errors.
Arguably the primary advantage of SD-WAN is security — the prime concern and top requested function for a WAN solution (67% of respondents, SDx Central).
SD-WAN has inbuilt security protocols with built-in encryption ensuring only authorized users can access corporate network assets. A company benefits from end-to-end encryption across the entire network, including the Internet.
That leads to a solution called SASE, that unifies SD-WAN, firewall, segmentation, routing, WAN optimization and visibility in a single platform. You can read more about SASE here.
Here are the main SD-WAN players in the market, according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure:
In 2019, the SD-WAN market broke the $1B barrier. IDC’s forecast indicates the market will grow at a 30.8% CAGR from 2018 to 2023 to reach $5.25 billion.
Two factors strongly influence interest: cloud usage and digitization, and ICT skills levels. Two main groups have shown most interest:
- Large enterprises with many small sites (retail, banks) — main attraction: reduce MPLS costs, reduce complexity, achieve faster deployments at the branch
- Highly digital companies with IT staff and high cloud usage — seeking intelligent, scalable connectivity aligned with their cloud-first strategy