5 Key Use Cases for SD-WAN

Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) is an automated, programmatic approach to managing enterprise network connectivity and circuit costs. It extends software-defined networking (SDN) into an application that businesses can use to quickly create a smart hybrid WAN.

Accelerate Cloud Migration & Optimisation of Cloud Architectures

SD-WAN can speed up migration to cloud services with single click connectivity to the cloud from your network. It can also enable organisations to quickly scale their cloud environments by leveraging a single solution across private cloud, public cloud and data centre to improve productivity and process.

The connectivity across platforms and transport layers, improves the performance of cloud-based applications via intelligent routing.

Optimisation with Real-Time Visibility & Control

Application performance has been highlighted by 41% of IT Practitioners in the State-of-the-WAN report (2020), as one of the potential barriers to entry for SD-WAN.

However, with SD-WAN, you are able to route application traffic in the most efficient, performant & cost-effective manner. This means your key applications get the best route, with the right resource to ensure performance. SD-WAN allows full visibility across the WAN, allowing intelligent application routing to drive business productivity, whilst improving connection resilience and reliability.

Real-time visibility and control, allows analytics to understand your organisational traffic and simplify the steps needed to ensure quality of service (QoS).

Simplified Network Operations, Increasing Business Agility & Flexibility

Network configurations are no longer dictated by command line interface (CLI). Business intent can easily be relayed across the network, centralised management across the branch networks further reduces the complexity of implementing these changes.

Diversified connectivity, insures against WAN outages, increasing network availability and increased control across the network, this improves business agility and responsiveness to change.

Dynamic Routing, Configuring Uniformity & Standardisation

Removing the need to troubleshoot misconfigurations, with a software defined WAN, you are able to build policies that adhere to company standards and business intent. Build policies once, standardise, and deploy multiple times with confidence they are solid.

Dynamic routing will direct traffic over the preferred link; if the landscape changes and the preferred link is no longer optimal, the traffic route can change to accommodate.

Automated, Transport Agnostic, Highly Available, Secure WAN

There is no need to configure individual pieces of hardware, simply ship hardware to site, plug it in, and let it phone home to “fetch” its config. Rationalisation of the network will reduce cost and improve overall performance.

Security is built into your network from the very beginning.

“SDN enables a variety of security benefits. A customer can split up a network connection between an end-user and the data centre and have different security settings for the various types of network traffic. A network could have one public-facing, low security network that does not touch any sensitive information. Another segment could have much more fine-grained remote access control with software-based firewall and encryption policies on it, which allows sensitive data to traverse over it.” Network World (2019)

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