For most multi-site businesses, it’s not a case of whether to adopt SD-WAN; it’s the pace at which to do it. It’s a good time therefore to look at what’s driving organisations to implement SD-WAN and what type of organisations the technology is best suited for.
There are 70+ recognised SD-WAN companies, each doing things differently. The Source Guy's role in the process is to help review your challenges and research the market to identify the best managed service and pure-play SD-WAN providers for your needs from our extensive portfolio. We make introductions and work together to ensure you select the best-fit technology and service at market competitive prices.
SD-WAN has a role to play in almost any business, and it’s not just companies with a global presence facing latency and performance challenges. Companies continue to embrace SD-WAN piecemeal or wholeheartedly, with the trigger typically coming from one or more of the following scenarios.
Geographic Expansion – Mergers and Acquisitions
For companies adding to their existing estate, SD-WAN can speed up the time it takes to bring a location onto the corporate network.
With business acquisitions, the parent company can retain the existing services used at the sites of the acquired company, using SD-WAN as an overlay to bring them under the same corporate umbrella and apply uniform network and security policies.
Some SD-WAN solutions offer zero-touch provisioning, which allows the edge router to configure its connection to the WAN using the available mix of services at each location. This means a site can be brought online quickly with a single or dual internet service, or even mobile data, incorporating the corporate WAN when it comes available at a later point.
The same method can be used for companies who don’t have co-termed agreements for their networks globally, meaning they can benefit from SD-WAN technology day-one, without having to replace the underlying connectivity, everywhere, all at once.
Capacity Optimisation
The SD-WAN edge router can dynamically route traffic over multiple data services based on the type of traffic and the quality of the underlying service. These can be private connections such as MPLS or the SD-WAN provider’s own low-latency backbone; public services such as xDSL/cable, 4G etc.
Companies commonly use a dual-connectivity strategy to maximise network utilisation, offloading less critical traffic from private networks to reduce cost and dependence on these circuits. In this context, SD-WAN can reduce the growth of MPLS spend.
There are cases where the SD-WAN optimised internet can be just as fast and reliable as the private network. This can be proven over time in your own network, further reducing reliance on private networks as and when you have the confidence to do so.
Resilience
SD-WAN enables a hybrid-network environment encompassing multiple network connections to the same site in an active/active configuration. These can be from one provider or multiple. Traffic can be balanced among the services under normal circumstances, but should one connection go down, traffic can fail over to the alternative service (or services).
Cloud Migration
SD-WAN is a great fit for cloud access. Whether hyperscale, SaaS or M365, SD-WAN service providers typically have low latency connections to cloud services, either by having points of presence (PoPs) in the same data centre as these cloud providers or by being directly connected to these services from their PoPs.
Application Acceleration
Much like WAN acceleration technology that went before it, SD-WAN is often used to speed up remote access of specific applications.
Application aware routing, low-latency connections (where the provider owns or manages the backbone), compression, WAN optimisation and data de-duplication all greatly improve the application user experience. This is especially in evidence across regions and when users are in outlier locations a long way from a business’ main geography of operation.
We’re seeing strong uptake of SD-WAN to accelerate cloud services, Unified Communications (business voice), ERP applications, VDI and Citrix.
MPLS Migration
MPLS still represents a foundational technology for many enterprise WANs.
On the upside MPLS is a privately managed backbone with built-in Quality of Service (QoS). It delivers predictability — packet loss and latency are much lower than those of the public internet for example. Circuits are typically managed too, with business-critical SLAs.
The downside? Committing dedicated capacity, maximum latency, and maximum time to repair has meant MPLS services tend to be expensive.
MPLS services are also notorious for their lack of agility. Site deployments involve a slow and rigid process that can take weeks and sometimes months to complete. Change management is also a hassle, requiring careful coordination with the carrier to ensure service levels are met.
SD-WAN is looking to address the challenges of MPLS — like cost, capacity, rigidity, and manageability. While SD-WAN typically does address many of these challenges, for critical services SD-WAN relies on predictable underlying networks like MPLS or a provider’s own backbone or managed network, to carry latency-sensitive, business critical traffic.
Security at the Branch
The introduction of internet breakout in branch increases the risk from internet-born threats. SD-WAN routers do not necessarily address these new security requirements inherently and many organisations look to extend their security architectures to support SD-WAN projects using edge firewalls or cloud security services.
SD-WAN providers know this and the best have managed next-gen firewall capabilities to augment IP-SEC VPN connections and / or low latency connectivity to cloud-based security services from third-parties. In some cases, therefore, security at the edge may be the entry-point to looking into SD-WAN.
Remote Access
There are a number of SD-WAN providers whose technology now extends to end-user devices. This allows organisations to extend the benefits of SD-WAN to users accessing corporate services in the cloud via internet connected devices at home or through public access WiFi and mobile data.
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