As the market grows, evaluating SD-WAN may turn out to be confusing. Before we go ahead, let us understand what is SD-WAN. It is a quickly developing technology that is being adopted by organizations and enterprises as a cost-effective option for connecting branch offices to their own data center offices, cloud-based applications, or SaaS.
Introduction to SD-WAN and how it works
SD-WAN has posed considerable challenges to organisations with a distributed workforce. Understanding SD-WAN technology is all about reliable and fast applications, the extreme costs of dedicated network circuits, and the complexities of daily tasks such as management, configuration, and monitoring that are all magnified across a WAN. Irrespective of the fact that an organisation grows organically or via acquisitions or mergers, a challenge posed to the IT managers is: How does SD-WAN work?
With advances in traffic shaping and WAN optimization, it will enhance the ability of the IT Department to move the traffic across the WAN, as all the problems are not dissolved at the network stage. The dedicated circuits, which provide insights on how SD-WAN works, are cost prohibitive and could take months to deploy. At branch offices, additional staff may be employed to manage devices.
Comes into the foray What is SD-WAN technology? A lot of organizations are confused about what exactly it is and what it is not. The products or services of SD-WAN tend to possess certain capabilities, like an oversight of central policy or the ability to manage traffic dynamically. The vendors go on to claim that they are able to offer SD-WAN products, whereas in reality they are only able to offer a fraction of the technology’s typical capabilities. Experts suggest that what is SD-WAN will lose its essence if any of the capabilities are missing.
The benefits of SD-WAN
When you are considering the adoption of SD-WAN, it is beneficial for an organization to assess its benefits. Since the IT team checks its various benefits, the decision to adopt this form of technology becomes a clear one. An example is if an organization has decided to comply with the high cost of MPLS to comply with critical business traffic. How does sd-wan work is that it relies on use of low-cost links like internet circuits.
SD-WAN provides redundancy among WAN connections, paving the way for a secondary path if the primary one is not available. They can resort to load balancing across multiple connections to enhance network performance and application as well.
With the maturing of SD-WAN, a lot of the vendors have gone on to incorporate cloud-based SD-WAN options where the control sits in the cloud. SD-WAN provides various benefits that can address issues of managing and maintaining WAN configuration.
SD-WAN vs. Traditional WANs
Traditional WANs have a series of capabilities that SD-WANs also possess, like features for disaster recovery and load balancing. But in traditional WANs, adding these capabilities may turn out to be time-consuming and complex, whereas in SD-WANs, automated, real-time, and standardized configuration changes are available. How SD-WAN works is that it reduces the possibility of human error necessitated by manual programming required by traditional WANs.
When comparing VPNs against SD-WANs, the differences are visible. VPNs are known to work well for businesses with a single IP backbone. Though the architecture is expected to break down, introducing video or audio when congestion impedes the network. The granular level of support provided by SD-WAN does make it more advanced when it comes to the quality of service. It is important to consider that VPNs will not be able to provide the necessary internet connectivity or advanced security that cloud-based services require.