To keep up with ever-changing market trends, altering client expectations, and rising levels of competition, companies are increasingly adopting digital transformation. Conventional network architectures, on the other hand, were not intended to handle the workloads and complexity involved with most data transformation initiatives. The dispersion of business-critical services across multiple clouds, particularly at branch locations, poses a significant concern for network performance.
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What Is SD-WAN?
The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is a virtual wide area network architecture that uses a centralized control function to assure the safe and secure transmission of traffic throughout the wide area network. This architectural solution enables users to successfully connect to applications by combining a range of transport technologies, such as LTE, broadband internet, and MPLS.
MPLS has long been the preferred solution for businesses with several sites. As your company’s activities grow, switching from MPLS to SD-WAN may result in a significant increase in the cost of this technology.
Why SD-WAN?
The following are the top SD WAN benefits to help you understand why your company should use this technology.
- Cost Reduction
Service providers mostly offer conventional wide area network solutions based on private network carriers, such as MPLS. The emergence of SD-WAN, which allows us to choose “underlay” carrier technologies with tremendous flexibility, has made our capacity to create a software-based “overlay” possible. You will likely continue to utilize some of your present wide area network (WAN) bearers, such as MPLS, but you may opt to supplement or even completely replace these bearers with far less expensive internet-based technologies, such as broadband and 5G. The SD-WAN overlay may manage and employ any bearer technology that is appropriate for the application.
- Network Control and Automation
A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) uses traditional networks while also providing centralized control capabilities. These features not only enhance network traffic management but also allow for the automatic monitoring and offloading of non-mission essential business applications. Using a centralized controller for traffic management may improve overall network performance and security.
- Enhanced Security Posture
Information technology teams face significant pressure in network operations, primarily due to security concerns and performance challenges. The right software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) has integrated security features like encryption, next-generation firewalls, and threat intelligence capabilities. These features may help to avoid data loss and downtime while meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.
- More Effective Use of Bandwidth
The ability of SD-WAN to provide a secure and fast connection both inside and outside of the network is becoming a game changer as more businesses rely on cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.
Rather than using hardware routers to regulate traffic, SD-WAN relies on a software overlay to enable more efficient use of wide area network (WAN) capacity via dynamic path selection. To put it another way, it prioritizes pathing for high-demand applications like voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing. You will dramatically improve the performance of various types of use by dispersing your bandwidth to the areas where it may have the most impact at any given time.
- Scalability
SD-WAN is also highly scalable in its capabilities. It can automatically scale up or down to accommodate the changing needs of network traffic.
The gateway allows for the addition of new network assets, which can then be governed using the same rules without the possibility of configuration drift occurring. Businesses can carry out policy configurations using the cloud infrastructure.
- Improved User Experience
SD-WAN enables you to provide excellent user experience, which helps organizations remain competitive and ensures that remote workers are productive. To put it another way, the process of obtaining and using the program must be simple and secure. Remote users may interact with cloud-hosted apps and workloads most effectively using software-defined wide-area networks.
- Enhanced Network Performance
By prioritizing essential applications, boosting bandwidth utilization, and dynamically partitioning traffic across several lines, SD-WAN enhances network performance. It ensures that end users will always have a stable connection, no matter where they are.
In addition, businesses may proactively detect and fix network faults thanks to SD-WAN’s real-time performance monitoring capabilities. Reduced latency and packet loss accelerate application response times.
- Better Disaster Recovery
Given that SD-WAN is a virtual network, it enables greater carrier diversity, which can aid a corporation’s recovery time in the event of a major disaster. Due to its complete reliance on hardware, restoring a wide-area network (WAN) after damage from hackers or other mitigating conditions is a far more complex and time-consuming task.
Conclusion
The use of software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) technology is an efficient method that not only reduces costs but also improves resilience, availability, and bandwidth. Additionally, it makes implementation and maintenance much simpler.