Is WAN Optimisation Dead in the age of SD-WAN?

First, the surge of cloud traffic over less expensive DIA links offering affordable bandwidth; the rise of hybrid cloud; and an ever evolving enterprise WAN infrastructure. Secondly, the demand of consumers and users for connectivity – are reasons that has challenged enterprises to take WAN transformation very seriously. Enterprise IT is now tasked with utilizing the best in breed available technologies to accelerate WAN performance. For example, choosing among technologies like SD-WAN, WAN optimization and thereby providing best possible feature set.

In trying to ensure essential networking technologies to accelerate WAN capabilities, IT comes across various notions wide spread across the binary world. Does WAN optimization work in the age of SD-WAN? Did SD-WAN kill WAN optimization? Or “Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is the ultimate killer of WAN optimization” –these are common statements, the ICT world has been hearing it on the grapevine.

It’s time to clear the air.

WAN Optimization back THEN!

During the time of MPLS when bandwidth came with constraints, WAN optimization was heavily used to address narrow bandwidth pipes on traffic transport, improve application performance and responsiveness. Today in the era of SD-WAN, the role of WAN optimization still makes a huge difference in overall network performance – Improved application performance and throughput (both being the key to deliver experience to users and customers).

As enterprise evolve further into the digital world, SD-WAN continues to remain the de facto network technology. The contrast is being noticed when WAN transport technologies are considered. Enterprise WAN optimization adoption shows a contraction in their usage in the recent years. However, the reason behind this is not SD-WAN. The shift towards a holistic approach to networks among technology linchpins, is the primary reason SD-WAN adoption in enterprises.

Secondly, as bandwidth constraint decreases; become highly available at a cheaper price, techniques like data de-duplication or compression to balance lower capacity links is no longer the most “sought out” goal. Similarly, other WAN optimisation techniques like TCP optimisation of proxies and application-specific proxies also are becoming less applicable. Cloud ready networks of the modern era have not only reduced latency but has also decreased the need of these once required WAN optimisation techniques.

It takes two to tango

There’s no doubt that SD-WAN has emerged as the game changing network technology in the cloud era. But alongside SD-WAN, WAN optimisation still remains a choice for network administrators to make network experience bespoke. Both the technologies – SD-WAN and WANop – are helping…. READ MORE