SD-WAN has been making waves in the networking world thanks to its ability to provide dependable edge-to-cloud connectivity. Here’s how it works, and how it could help you.
Recent research by Forrester* found that for 1 in 3 IT decision-makers, software defined WAN (SD-WAN) is their top organizational priority in 2022 – but why are businesses excited by the technology?
Due to increasingly complex and distributed network infrastructures, as well as the need to support remote workforces in 2022, enterprises are realizing that having SD-WAN is more crucial than ever. Offering the centralized management, security, and performance necessary for today’s work-from-anywhere, cloud-first business environment, the solution proves a viable option for branch connectivity.
In this blog, we discuss the benefits and challenges of SD-WAN, its popular use cases, and how you can support your business’ SD-WAN adoption.
Software-defined refers to the fact that the focus of a product and the solution it provides hails from software, rather than hardware, while WAN stands for Wide Area Network, which is a “collection of local-area networks (LANs) or other networks that communicate with one another”. Put these together and you have a technology that takes advantage of software capabilities to bring cloud connectivity to enterprises’ multiple branches through a simplified topology.
SD-WAN incorporates a traditional hardware-based networking model and adds a software-defined virtual network overlay on top. This overlay—like a network on top of another network—is managed and provisioned centrally by a controller, removing the need for device-by-device network configuration and management. The underlay, or data plane, is then left with the responsibility to process and transit packets between devices.
The overlay can run over a range of standard network transport services (acting ‘transport agnostic’), including the public internet, 4G, 5G, and MPLS. Based on the performance of the underlying network transport, application-aware routing will control where and when an application uses a specific service to maintain the performance of real-time and sensitive applications.
SD-WAN works to provide “intelligent application-aware routing across the WAN.” And it acts as a flexible, private overlay over any network transport type: Whether that’s the public internet, MPLS, or combination of the two. The brain of your SD-WAN will continuously interrogate these multi-transport “underlays” to determine the best end-to-end network path, which subsequently results in improved performance, resiliency, and lower costs for your business.
SD-WAN is a response to the growing need for a more efficient method to send traffic directly over the internet from branch locations to trusted SaaS and cloud-based applications, while ensuring security compliance. It answers this need by simplifying the WAN architecture through a centralized control function that steers traffic securely and directly between branches and to cloud service providers (CSPs).
There are a number of benefits to utilizing SD-WAN in your enterprise network that traditional or alternative setups cannot promise. These include:
Alongside the benefits, there can also be challenges that arise when adopting and utilizing SD-WAN for your enterprise. Some possible drawbacks to be aware of include:
There are a handful of use cases for SD-WAN connectivity that address the many modern challenges present in enterprise networking. These include:
You can level up your SD-WAN through a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution (something we’ve covered previously). This offers an alternative to general network access, instead replacing it with secure per-user and per-session access to specific applications. This then increases visibility into who is accessing what data at any given time, and allows for easier management of resources as well as more effective safeguarding.
This is particularly helpful when your enterprise is dealing with a remote workforce, as it enables you to discern whether one of your employees is just working from a different location than usual, or if that new sign-on is coming from someone more sinister.
The current generation of SD-WAN solutions available on the market often house multiple ZTNA elements, positioning them as exceptionally secure, integrated solutions. ZTNA is a particularly beneficial security integration for remote workforces and while it can be implemented independently, it can also be implemented as part of a broader network solution which includes SD-WAN, known as SASE.
Gartner predicts that “by 2025, at least 60 percent of enterprises will have SASE strategies and timelines in place.” SD-WAN is an important foundation of any SASE architecture. The term SASE refers to a framework for converging the best elements of software-defined networking and SD-WAN with modernized edge security.
The end result is a transformed network architecture that is dynamic, flexible, and secure, and can provide the performance needed for today’s 24×7 applications and resources hosted across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
Ultimately, SASE is the next step in any modern enterprise’s SD-WAN infrastructure.
MPLS, or multi-protocol label switching, is the legacy technology to SD-WAN. MPLS is a label-switched-path network model in which data packets take a pre-defined, private route straight to their destination from the provisioning of Layer 2 Ethernet or Layer 3 Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). These label-switched paths can be statically defined to direct traffic around congested parts of a network on an end-to-end, low-latency route.
The two technologies have a handful of similarities. Firstly, they both deliver high-performance, reliable, and private WAN, as they are both a type of private overlay (with SD-WAN relying on Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) VPNs, and MPLS on labels). They also both function to classify traffic into different importance levels to support a more efficient and reliable network. But they differ mainly in that “while MPLS is a dedicated circuit, SD-WAN is virtual overlay and decoupled from physical links.”
However, you can use MPLS together with SD-WAN through a hybrid WAN design to get the ‘best of both worlds’. The application-aware routing benefit of SD-WAN can ensure critical traffic like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is directed over your reliable MPLS transport, with non-critical traffic directed over internet transport. Using MPLS and SD-WAN together is a great way to lay the foundation for your organization as cloud connectivity continues to grow and evolve in the years to come.
With an enhanced SD-WAN fabric on your side, it’s easier for your company to handle distributed and complicated architectures in a multicloud environment.
SD-WAN is generally provided and managed by a service provider like Cisco, VMware, Versa, Fortinet, and Aruba. These vendors provide the orchestration platforms and network appliances, however, choosing the best mix of underlying network transports will ensure the solution will operate at maximum efficiency. It’s also important to determine the operational and support model of the SD-WAN solution that best fits your business, whether is be one fully managed by an MSP, your in-house IT organization, or a mix of both.
Opting for network functions virtualization (NFV) is a great place to start on your journey to SD-WAN. NFV acts as the “the replacement of network appliance hardware with virtual machines” and works to separate your network’s communication services from dedicated hardware like routers and traditional firewalls. Adding NFV functionalities like Megaport Virtual Edge (an end-to-end NFV tool) improves the performance of that SD-WAN by replacing hardware with virtual connectivity right to the branch.
If your business is interested in transitioning to an SD-WAN infrastructure, or needs some help making your current SD-WAN more efficient, Megaport can put you on the right track.
By hosting network services directly on Megaport’s global, private Software Defined Network (SDN), Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) enables companies to quickly deploy edge networking when coupled with their SD-WAN, eliminating the need to purchase and maintain hardware. MVE enhances your existing enterprise SD-WAN platform by giving you the ability to strategically build optimal pathways to critical applications wherever they reside.
For companies adjusting to a permanent remote workforce, at least part of the time, MVE provides a private, secure, scalable, and global network backbone to optimize SD-WAN connectivity. MVE extends your network to the edge, right to your workers’ home office (or kitchen counter), with no hardware needed. In a way, MVE delivers a hybrid SD-WAN “transport” with the benefits of predictable latency, dynamic provisioning, private layer 2 connectivity, and dedicated bandwidth, making it a preferred solution over MPLS for many customers.
And since Megaport partners with leading SD-WAN vendors—such as Cisco, Fortinet, Versa, Aruba, and VMware, which make up more than 70% of the SD-WAN provider market—your business can shop around for the features and models that suit you best.
*Source: Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Networks And Telecom Survey, 2021.
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