Increasing use of applications by branch users result to a higher wide area network (WAN) bandwidth consumption. How does your business address this challenge?
Today’s businesses continue to advance as more applications and services are accessed by users at the branch. This results to a higher wide area network (WAN) bandwidth consumption which the corporate IT must address. But these demands are complex to cater given the complexity, cost and static architecture inherent to the existing WAN.
Traditional WAN connections are composed of expensive leased lines (private MPLS circuits) or unpredictable Internet connections such as DSL, cable, 4G/LTE. Leased lines typically provide high quality of service, but with the tradeoff of limited capacity, higher cost and long deployment lead times. Broadband provides fast deployments and greater capacity, but with the tradeoff of reliability. It seems that setting up a Hybrid WAN is the solution to address both capacity and reliability concerns but incorporating both private MPLS and broadband Internet, on its own, does not increase agility, performance nor simplicity.
Software-Defined WAN provides the advantages typically associated with Software-Defined Networking in data centers but for Wide Area Network solutions for enterprise branch offices. SD-WAN combines the economics and flexibility of a hybrid WAN. It includes policy-based network-wide application performance, visibility and control while dramatically simplifying the WAN by delivering virtualized services from the public/private cloud to branch offices. SD-WAN virtualizes resources and aggregates multiple links (e.g. Private, Cable, DSL, 4G LTE) and steers traffic over the optimal links to the edges in branch offices, private data centers, campuses, and headquarters.
SD-WAN reduces the time to connect a branch with its zero-touch deployment capability. Setting up and propagating policies can now easily be done using a central controller or orchestrator. This provides an enterprise-wide view and configurability of all WAN links on all sites.
As today’s applications do not only reside in the data center, SD-WAN can help businesses and organizations to achieve enterprise-grade performance, security, visibility, and control over both public Internet and private networks.