The SD-WAN Journey Doesn’t Have to be Painful…if You Pick the Right Solution

In the last decade, cloud came about to address the need for agility, speed and cost savings. Along the way, several technologies came to enable the transition. This has triggered significant innovation in the network with SDxx to support the changing demands in app consumptions model, traffic patterns and automated and dynamic environments.

Today, the hottest innovation in the network aimed at increasing agility to support the move to the cloud is SD-WAN for the branch office. A little more than two years ago, SD-WAN came about to address fundamental challenges in the WAN architecture. These challenges can be categorized as follows:

1. The speed at rolling out new branch offices – This is mostly due to the lengthy process of provisioning network services like MPLS to the branch office. For most businesses, months is no longer acceptable and the big question is how to shrink the deployment cycle to hours?
2. The high cost – of MPLS connectivity and overall management of WAN architecture. This means deploying, configuring box-by-box, managing the day-to-day operational elements, maintaining and troubleshooting the WAN environment as well as managing bandwidth capacity is forcing IT organizations to consider alternative options. The question is how to reduce Day 0, 1, 2 operational cost while leveraging broadband internet services?
3. The security and performance of app access – As more apps (~50%) are accessed through broadband connectivity, performance and security are a challenge to ensure user productivity and business uptime. In general, broadband connectivity tends to have more packet loss, higher latency and jitter, and much less secure communication compared to MPLS. So a solution with built-in capabilities to boost performance and secure traffic combined with open ecosystem partner support will help the business moving forward.
4. The fourth point is somewhat related to app security and performance but more around network WAN availability – Most enterprises are paying for two sources of transport. One is active and one acts as the back-up. Ideally, you want both links to be in active/active mode load sharing the load. This helps in optimizing available bandwidth capacity as well as network availability. In addition, if one of those links fails, how do you make sure the fail over is sub-second with no interruption to applications?

To summarize: speed, cost, security and performance, and high availability are forcing businesses to consider SD-WAN solutions to tackle new business models, improve access and performance to cloud-based apps and address bandwidth requirements.

Now, the big challenge for most customers is the transition to building a better WAN architecture that encompasses performance, security, extensibility and visibility and control. Organizations may not rip and replace what they have in place. So it is critical to have a solution that can easily integrate in such brownfield environments as well as greenfield deployments. The integration must deliver quantifiable value to the business based on the challenges highlighted above.

Here is a list of items that customers should consider as they embark on the SD-WAN journey [and don’t forget to establish baselines] to accelerate their digital business transformation:

1. Seamless integration – It can’t be a network forklift with a huge risk. This is by far the most critical consideration from business and IT perspective. In addition, it should support flexible deployment models (physical, virtual or cloud-based) to accommodate customer needs as well as service chaining with existing appliances like FW. This will maximize the return on investment and accelerate business transformation.
2. Business-centric model – It is important that business policies are defined in an overlay fashion and then deployed into the infrastructure automatically across the branch offices through a centralized management platform. You want to be able to create different virtual overlays with policies based on business intent for different users and apps utilizing the connectivity links you define without added complexity or compromise on security. Then it all happens dynamically. This is key as it ensures IT agility, increases operational efficiency and improves security.
3. Built-in performance & security – This can’t be an afterthought. Your business can’t afford slow app response times or security breaches as you transform your environment. As not all SD-WAN solutions are created equal, make sure you look for built-in capabilities that accelerate app performance regardless of link type (MPLS, broadband, 4G/LTE) or where the app maybe sitting (on premise, private or public cloud/SaaS/IaaS). In other words, make sure the solution enables intelligent traffic steering to dynamically route apps based on policies and advanced metrics like packet loss and latency. In addition, a solution that it is inherently secure based on segmentation.
4. Lastly, you can’t be flying blind. You must be able to monitor traffic and apps in real-time so you know what to do (and very quickly) if something goes wrong.