Recently, the vast growth of network applications and various devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) has placed considerable stress on wide area networks (WAN). Businesses that have deployed WAN solutions now face various challenges in managing and controlling their complexities.
To overcome such barriers, software-defined wide area networks, or SD-WAN solutions, have emerged. SD WANs consist of virtual or physical appliances and a central controller that uses the overlay networks to connect the branches directly to the cloud services, data centers, and each other.
SD WANs simplify network operations by allowing administrators to push out policies remotely from a central management tool. Such policies permit efficient use of distinct forms of transport by forming secure overlays and prioritizing applications, improving network performance, user experience, and agility while lowering network costs.
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Businesses use SD-WAN solutions to meet the below-listed challenges effectively:
Traditional networks used the hub and spoke model for an enterprise data centre for inspecting traffic. This model can interfere with network performance, especially considering the highly distributed workforce’s access, i.e., WANs to the branches.
On the contrary, SD-WAN can connect the branches directly to the data centre, the cloud, or the software as a service application. It helps shorten the transit time, lower overhead, enhance application performance and eliminate bottlenecks. It can be done with all the traffic or even a subset of traffic from the organizational business.
Also, branches typically have a variety of connectivity and transport independence offered by SD-WAN, which can accelerate branch connectivity.
The architecture of traditional WAN solutions was formed long before cloud computing. This solution was built on the premise that the applications are hosted in a centralized data centre.
Hence, the traffic from the branches requires traveling back to the data centre to access the applications. It often creates backhauling of traffic. Businesses can transport the data directly from the branch to the cloud using the SD-WAN solution.
Security is a significant driver of the SD-WAN solution. Its high stake in providing high-end security makes SD-WAN one of the better managed services. The solution offers a secure overlay to trusted devices over an insecure medium like the internet.
Its additional key security capabilities, like application-based firewalls, URL filtering, intrusive prevention systems, and other threat management capabilities, permit businesses to consider moving to a decentralized security model.
70% of outages in applications are because of network issues. In many organizations, users employ high bandwidth-consuming applications, most of which are SaaS or cloud-based solutions, which results in congestion in the network leading to outages.
SD-WAN offers administrators an accurate view of the network so they can pinpoint issues prevalent in networks and take instant steps for their resolution. Such visibility can help administrators in capacity and application prioritization planning to improve user experience.
SD-WAN solutions permit administrators to route some traffic using multi-protocol label switching and some towards affordable broadband circuits. It improves application performance, eases congestion, lowers networking costs, and provides an improved user experience.
Additionally, to provide administrators with the potential to route traffic along distinct transport forms, they can prioritize mission-critical apps over others. This way, the users on videoconference sales calls are not hampered by network traffic from colleagues streaming the internet during breaks. Using the service quality feature in SD-WAN, administrators can deprioritize less crucial apps to ensure critical apps perform well.
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