Your Complete Guide to SD-WAN

Examining the architecture of the SD-WAN could be perplexing, particularly as the market flourishes. This ultimate guide will assist all the IT gurus in learning the basics of SD-WAN, opt for the right product, and use it with authority.

The SD-WAN or Software-Defined Wide Area Network is a rapidly advancing technology universally adopted by organizations and enterprises as a budget-friendly way to connect cloud-based applications, SaaS, and data centers to their branch offices.

This ultimate guide to SD-WAN will walk you through all the things of SD-WAN. The blog comprehensively describes the fundamentals of SD-WAN's technology, its working, benefits, and buying options. In the end, the guide further provides deep insight into how the architecture of the SD-WAN will mature in the coming years.

What is SD-WAN?

The (WAN) wide area network has been consistently posing major challenges for businesses and enterprises with divided personnel. The requirement for reliable and agile app performance, the towering expense of dedicated network circuits, and the complications of routine tasks like management, monitoring, and configuration are all magnified across a Wide Area Network. Doesn't matter whether a company flourishes through acquisitions and mergers or organically; it could be tough for IT staff to deploy such technology rapidly to connect consumers to business apps.

Whereas advancements in Wide Area Network (WAN) traffic shaping and optimization definitely assist in enhancing the IT industry's capability to move traffic throughout the WAN, they don't necessarily solve all the issues occurring at the edge of the network. Almost all the dedicated circuits require months to be successfully deployed and are cost-prohibitive. Extra team members may also be needed to control devices at remote locations and branch offices.

Enter Software-Defined Wide Area Network. Technology centralizes the control of the network by automating and abstracting the tasks usually programmed the hard way on every single edge device. The architecture of the SD-WAN builds a network overlay that allows IT to remotely secure, monitor, manage, and configure the majority of the components of the WAN, including traffic flows and edge devices.

By properly abstracting the transport layer from hardware to software, SD-WAN advances the prioritization of traffic, allowing IT to utilize cheap private and public links like wireless and broadband along with the relatively costly MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) connections. The flexibility, centralization, and automation offered by SD-WAN lead to a much faster WAN environment for small to large-scale organizations.

How does SD-WAN technology work?

Upon seeing the launch of SD-WAN – and the countless variations of SD-WAN offerings – plenty of businesses have been puzzled about what SD-WAN precisely is.

The services and products of SD-WAN possess some crucial abilities such as the capability of managing traffic dynamically, centralized policy oversight, and virtualization of the WAN connection.

At times, vendors do tend to claim to provide SD-WAN products when, in reality, they only offer a tiny little portion of the technology's usual abilities, a practice known as 'SD-WAN washing.'

Pretty much most of an IT experts’ knowledge of the architecture of SD-WAN will come from familiarizing themselves with all the jargons commonly spoken in conjunction with the technology. For example, one commonly used term is controller, which is a software or a hardware customer that distributes security and network policies to connected devices and directs the flow of data between 2 points.

One more crucial SD-WAN term, as described above, is overlay, which defines how the architecture of the SD-WAN sits on top of the network. This dictionary of SD-WAN terms offers all the relevant information about the service provider, and lingo vendors.

What are the Benefits of SD-WAN?

While thinking of adopting SD-WAN, enterprises must examine SD-WAN's benefits. As IT departments verify sufficient advantages, the decision to adopt the SD-WAN technology becomes crystal clear. For example, in case a business has taken the risk of bearing towering expenses of MPLS to fulfill the requirements of business-critical traffic, the architecture of the SD-WAN allows the usage of lower-cost links, like internet circuits.

The SD-WAN technology provides redundancy across the WAN connections, automatically failing over to a second path in case the first one is unavailable or fails. The Software-Defined Wide Area Network can make use of load balancing among numerous connections to enhance the application and performance of the network too.

As SD-WAN advances, various vendors have included cloud-based SD-WAN choices, where the controller mostly sits in the cloud. Extracting the controller from the data center must allow much more network scalability, flexibility, and enhanced management. Plenty of businesses are taking that route.

The SD-WAN technology offers countless advantages that can address concerns of maintaining and managing the configuration of WAN.

How to purchase the right SD-WAN?

Buying the right SD-WAN is not an easy nut to crack – it needs a tremendous amount of preparation and research. But, numerous maestros have suggested to stress less over vendor lock-in – which is, honestly, unavoidable – and stress more on choosing a service or product suitable for the business.

Even though it is an overlay technology, modifications in the policies and the network infrastructure could possibly stall the objective of getting centralized management and improved performance of the application.

One convenient method to begin to understand what the business really requires from the SD-WAN technology is to make an SD-WAN request for proposal. The department of IT could utilize this RFP to make a summary of all the technology requirements – including network functions virtualization, link steering and remediation, and dynamic path selection – and how the vendor would actually tackle them.

The provider of SD-WAN will be precious in how well clients acquire QoS, including classifying and identifying traffic and examining the decisions in real-time. Clients have to comprehend a provider's QoS expertise and how it would assist in fulfilling the business's performance aims and objectives. Prospective clients might also be interested in assessing the vendor's console's usability, particularly the metrics they deem most crucial and how conveniently the console could be personalized.

One of the biggest selling points of SD-WAN is its network visibility, so the console must communicate the ability to both control and see what's happening throughout the entire network.

The future of SD-WAN

The Software-Defined Wide Area Network is a technology that would most probably pair amazingly with both fifth-generation wireless, or 5G, and the IoT (Internet of Things).