Member Article

Six traits to look for in an SD-WAN provider

As business applications increasingly move to the cloud, software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) are capturing the attention of CIOs across nearly every industry, promising greater control over WAN infrastructure and the applications traffic traversing the network. Unlike legacy WAN architectures, an SD-WAN is architected with cloud-based applications in mind, providing organisations with greater agility and efficiency in line with business demands. With the right SD-WAN solution, organisations can automatically orchestrate network traffic, assure service level agreements are met, deliver a superior user experience, and reduce costs. However, not all SD-WAN solutions are the same.

There are six key traits organisations should focus attention toward when evaluating SD-WAN solution providers:

1) Performance An SD-WAN capitalises on path selection and traffic engineering to optimise WAN services links between branch offices and data centres, enabling faster and more reliable performance for business applications. It is vital to choose a provider that can guarantee enhanced quality-of-service across the WAN, regardless of the underlying network conditions, to deliver consistent applications performance with an exceptional user experience, while facilitating the rapid addition of new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to the organisation’s application mix.

**2) Lower costs ** With an SD-WAN solution in place, dramatic cost-reductions can be realised. By replacing or augmenting MPLS connections with commodity broadband connectivity (used as the backbone for SD-WANs), Silver Peak clients – for instance – have the flexibility to use any combination of underlying transport technologies without compromising network or application performance, while lowering connectivity costs by up to 90 percent.

**3) Revenue growth ** Revenue growth is important, however an SD-WAN architecture shouldn’t rely on lower costs alone. SD-WAN vendors and integrators should work with the organisation’s in-house technology team to understand how the WAN network will enable the delivery of new applications. Ultimately, this should be quantified in terms of business productivity gains, time-to-market for new revenue streams, and increased business agility.

**4) Visibility and control ** An SD-WAN solution must enable organisations to align application priority, security and performance with business intent – as companies assign policies, control, and direct all WAN traffic. In fact, some of the most tangible benefits of building an SD-WAN is the ability to identify and direct applications from the first packet received in alignment with business intent, as well as the ability to monitor throughput, packet loss, latency and jitter, all in real time.

5) Security Organisations should look for an SD-WAN provider that ensures the encryption of all WAN traffic as it traverses the WAN. An SD-WAN should also orchestrate and automate direct internet access to SaaS and cloud applications from branches via the usage of split tunnels, path conditioning and other techniques, as well as automatically direct any suspicious traffic to regional or data centre-based firewalls. In addition, organisations should seek an SD-WAN provider than can effectively segment applications to ensure business critical applications traverse their own exclusive business intent overlays, segregating business critical applications from general WAN traffic.

6) Ease of transition and integration Moving from traditional router-based WAN architectures to an SD-WAN can seem daunting at first glance. However, experienced networking partners can simplify the transition, point out potential issues before they arise, and ensure that migration is smooth and without any disruption to business operations.

With the SD-WAN market predicted to hit $6bn by 2020, the enthusiasm for this innovative technology is growing fast. However, before jumping hastily into an SD-WAN solution, companies should take the time to critically assess the SD-WAN providers and which features and functionalities will best compliment their business processes and requirements.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Silver Peak .