What are the benefits of the SD-WAN solution? Learn about the power of software-defined networking in the WAN.
According to IDC, most enterprises plan to choose their SD-WAN solution before the end of 2019. 90% of companies are going to adopt the cloud, either as infrastructure, cloud applications or some cloud service, and this is a big challenge. SD-WAN solutions can help you on this journey.
In this article, discover the main benefits that a Cisco SD-WAN solution can bring to your company.
The flow of data and devices is outpacing the limits of traditional WAN architectures , making it nearly impossible for networks to keep up.
With the power of software-defined networking in the WAN, enterprises can improve performance, reduce costs and stay protected.
SD-WAN is a software-driven solution that directs traffic, maintains application performance and adapts to changing conditions without direct oversight from the IT manager. SD-WAN is a technology that helps simplify this cloud adoption.
Next we will explain what SD-WAN is and how it helps companies to modernize their network, improve the user experience with applications, reduce costs and integrate with the cloud while increasing security.
How do you work with traditional architectures?
In traditional network architectures, headquarters send all traffic from remote offices to the datacenter over an MPLS network provided by an operator. From the datacenter this traffic destined for the Internet goes through a centralized firewall. What is happening? With this massive adoption of the cloud, what we are seeing is that between 50 and 80% of the traffic from these remote sites is destined for the cloud, so it no longer makes sense to pass all this traffic through a centralized firewall architecture in the datacenter. On the one hand, we waste expensive bandwidth resources and on the other hand, we are adding unnecessary latency to the applications. All of this impacts the user experience.
A possible solution to this problem is to enable direct internet access to each of the remote delegations and not have to pass this traffic through the datacenter. We can use fiber, adsl, 4G… which gives us a lot of flexibility. But this poses certain security risks to be taken into account, in addition to a certain operational and configuration complexity.
What is the solution?
The solution is SD-WAN, as it allows optimizing the experience of the applications that go to the datacenter through MPLS, but also allows enabling these accesses in each delegation.
What are the benefits of the SD-WAN solution?
Ease of operation and management.
Management from a simple, centralized console that can reside at customer premises or in the cloud. This will provide us with simple workflows for configuration and for the detection and resolution of network problems.
2. Rapid site deployment and cost reduction.
SD-WAN allows automated provisioning of equipment and independence from the transport layer. We comment these two features, the auto provisioning allows to open a new site without moving a technician, simply by connecting the equipment to the Internet the equipment will auto provision in a few seconds. On the other hand side, the independence of the transport layer, gives us the option to have connection with 4G from day one and not having to wait for the operator to provision the requested MPLS or fiber access.
3. Optimization of the user experience.
SD-WAN chooses automatically and completely transparent to the user the transport that best suits the applications we are using. It takes into account latency, jitter, packet loss parameters… Voice traffic, which requires certain maximum latencies, is not the same as video traffic, which is more permissive with latencies but requires very low packet losses.
SD-WAN provides analytics and thanks to them we obtain greater visibility of the entire network, of the bottlenecks that we may have in each of the delegations and we will be able to optimize it and anticipate any problem that may arise in the future so that they do not impact our business.
4. Simplifies the cloud migration process (IaaS/SaaS).
Optimization of applications and workloads.
Facilitates integration with the cloud at two different levels. The first one helps companies to adopt Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions in the cloud i.e. move workloads to the public cloud either Amazon, Azure, Google Cloud… in a simple way. The second level refers to the optimization of applications in the cloud i.e. if companies want to adopt SaaS such as Office 365, Salesforce, Dropbox…
5. Protection against threats. Integrated security
SD-WAN integrates security in the routers themselves at the sites. It integrates security at the level of application firewall, IPS or protection system against intrusions, URL filtering and Cloud security with Cisco Umbrella. Thanks to all this security functionality integrated into the router itself, we will be able to enable security in each Internet access of each delegation.
Learn more about SD-WAN technology
https://www.cisco.com/c/es_es/solutions/enterprise-networks/sd-wan/what-is-sd-wan.html?CCID=cc000005
https://www.solutel.com/post/que-es-sd-wan/
