The advent of Google Maps and Waze as a downloadable application changed the way people travelled daily, all over the world. Drivers are now forewarned about potential hazards and backups on their usual route, given time estimations as to how long they would sit if they chose to take it, and are offered alternative routes that would get them to their destination faster (even if it was a longer detour).
SD-WAN is like Waze for enterprises’ networks, giving them greater visibility across their organisation’s networks. It is a software-defined WAN architecture that allows enterprises to use any combination of transport services, including broadband internet services, MPLS, and Long-Term-Evolution (LTE/5G), to securely connect users to applications, and enable you to control your entire network from a central location, while enjoying greater visibility and flexibility.
Signs that you should consider implementing SD-WAN include slow network speeds, or even unchecked broken connections that are resulting in packet loss, poor performance, link failure, lack of visibility across your branches, and difficulty managing multiple services and activities across multiple sites and devices and having no failover at a site level. Cyber security threats and cloud adoption are also indicators to consider adoption of SD-WAN.
When deployed, this solution enables an organisation’s head office to have real-time oversight of its regional branches, alerting the IT team when there is a break in connectivity or security parameters. This is a major benefit, particularly as SD-WAN will not only send you the alert as the break occurs, but it will save you time and unnecessary expenditure, by telling you exactly where the break occurred. Because it is intelligent, it will safely re-route the affected application traffic selectively until the break can be repaired to ensure business continues as usual.
The ability to shape and set restrictions for different types of users and different business critical applications is important for several reasons. Enterprises typically pay large sums each month for a dedicated line, and often have more than one to act as backup. The ability to direct your traffic means that you could reduce the number of dedicated backup lines required by your business, signing up for a regular broadband or mobile line for secondary applications and as a backup to the dedicated line, thus saving that substantial monthly cost. By setting business rules, including permissions and restrictions for each user and application, IT Managers are removing much of the bottleneck in the business, speeding up processes as the network does not need to constantly ask if it is okay for a particular user to perform each task.
As the use of business-critical, cloud-based applications continues to increase, enterprises with a distributed infrastructure of remote offices or workspaces, and an expanding remote workforce, need to adapt to ever increasing operational demands. Many enterprises have relied on traditional Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), Wide-Access Networks (WAN), and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to manage their network traffic in the past, however, the ever-changing needs of the enterprise have added pressure to these inflexible systems, and they are struggling to keep pace with change.
SD-WAN has no geographic restrictions, so it can quite easily connect to your smaller more remote sites which would be reach, or cost-prohibitive for an MPLS connection. The ability to deliver the same service, regardless of which transport mechanism is used means your business requirements are met with greater agility, flexibility, and speed. SD-WAN allows for scalability, so you can add and remove connections at any site whenever you need to. It helps enterprises to ensure that their organisation has a future-ready network, with enhanced security, end-to-end encryption, and firewall capabilities built in.
Liquid Intelligent Technologies works closely with our enterprise clients to assess their current situation and gain greater insight into their goals. By implementing a fully managed SD-WAN solution we are helping them to realise significant savings and improve network performance, while gaining the value of added functionality.
- Deon Geyser, CEO Liquid Intelligent Technologies, South Africa
