The Role of SD-WAN and Cloud in Enterprise WAN Transformation

There is no denying the fact that SD-WAN has emerged as a preferred choice for a lot of enterprises over the years. For businesses depending on the Cloud’s evolving technology, there is a lot of stress to digitally transform the day-to-day operations to make them all the more efficient and user-friendly.

“Legacy network architectures are incompatible with digital transformation initiatives,” says Shlomo Kramer co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks, “Converging networking and security into the cloud gives IT the agility and operational efficiencies to meet today’s business requirements.“

IT leaders are required to implement and provide a seamless experience for their customers while managing their internal operations. With the implementation of the Cloud, businesses seek to expand their horizons, as the internal peripheries continue to touch the horizons. SD-WAN helps manage networks centrally while enabling management of geographically dispersed locations.

For the Cloud:

SD-WAN is an important tool for businesses, which are continuously adopting SaaS-based applications. With the WAN, client-server applications were housed in an enterprise data center, which in turn were situated in public or private Cloud environments. However, to provide efficiency and effectiveness, it was necessary to build up a solution which could centrally manage the Cloud, without getting into the hassles of routers and switches.

The implementation of the SD-WAN enables leveraging Network Function Virtualization along with Virtual Private Networks and Voice over Internet Protocols(VOPI). Over and above, the SD-WAN is ideal for enterprises looking to minimize the need for additional physical equipment while at the same time minimizing costs.

Some other benefits of implementing the cloud-based SD-WAN include, but are not limited to:

• A simplified infrastructure, which reduces the costs of ownership and ushers in new levels of operational efficiency, and responsiveness.
• The transformation of WAN into SD-WAN adds a degree of predictability in application performance, which helps manage the policies centrally.
• There is an additional traffic management facility, which can let users steer all their data into the Cloud, without having to worry about installing physical data centers.
• There is an additional degree of business continuity, which is enabled by separating the control and forwarding functions of network administrators. This way, a dynamic control can be created within the Cloud, to manage data recovery and reduce failure downtimes.
• The Cloud becomes an integral part of the data management model, especially when it comes to supporting multiple classes of video, voice and data management.

Since the Cloud has enabled such features, there are endless opportunities to increase the agility and the functionality with the implementation of SD-WAN. Despite being in its nascent stage, there is hardly any doubt that enterprises are rapidly moving towards implementing this technology to reap the benefits in the long run.

The three main factors which are coming to the fore with the implementation of the SD-WAN are security (firewall and Unified Threat management capabilities), WAN Optimization and intelligent dynamic path selections.  An added advantage is the use of analytics which can be coupled up with policy control and management.

As time passes, the SD-WAN market will become a $7.53 billion market by 2021. Out of this, around 72% enterprises will increase the number of remote sites, which will use the WAN over the next one year.