FINAL WORD

Branch office connectivity has long posed a challenge for geographically distributed organisations, a challenge that grows as organisations enter new markets or expand within existing ones. Essentially, configuring or even changing wide area network infrastructure at branch offices can prove a nightmare given the distributed nature of the beast and the remote touch points involved. Attempts at delivering the lean branch office have sometimes resorted to public cloud services that may fail to meet IT requirements for control, security and more.

Software defined wide area networking SD-WAN, however, can present a technology paradigm for wide area networking that delivers easy-to-deploy, inexpensive connectivity to branch offices, while ensuring high performance and quality levels. Wide area networking issues are hard to address because of the distributed nature of the resources, but certain SD-WAN solutions can enable automation and orchestration from a centralised location.

With SD-WAN IT organisations can dramatically simplify the management, configuration and maintenance of wide area networks with greater ease, efficiency and effectiveness. Secure paths are created across multiple wide area network locations with zero-touch provisioning. Bandwidth can be virtually allocated and network traffic controlled from a single, centralised location.

Bhaskar Peruri is Regional Manager of Middle East at Silver Peak

This solution fits in perfectly with enterprises of varying sizes, locations and vertical markets, and tackles common pain points including high cost of wide area network connectivity caused by wide area network transport, equipment and personnel expenses, slow provisioning of network resources and traffic congestion, hassle of complex devices and hardware updates, difficulty in adapting or scaling to changing business requirements and inadequate level of network performance for emerging cloud computing

But in order to be effective, a largescale SD-WAN rollout requires a rapid installation process for individual offices, particularly when dealing with branch offices without dedicated IT staff.

Essential requirements for SD-WANs include granular visibility into both legacy and cloud applications, as well as centrally assigned business intent policies to secure and control all wide area network traffic. To be implemented at scale, these capabilities must be easily distributed from headquarters to branch offices.

Ideally, the SD-WAN solution should allow for flexible orchestration to ensure rapid branch rollouts. As part of the configuration, administrators can map local traffic classes into deployment profiles. These policies can then be folded into discretely managed virtual topologies and using the key tenets of software-defined networking and virtualisation, these virtual overlays can ensure proper end-to-end handling of wide area network traffic according to defined business intent. For instance:

• All voice traffic stays within its own overlay, uses its own traffic tunnels, is arranged into a full mesh as all sites need to talk to each other, uses multiple connection types and requires maximum quality.

• All enterprise data is also segregated and uses a dual hub and spoke topology with datacentres as the hubs. It also uses multiple connection types and requires maximum availability.

• Guest WiFi only connects the sites that offer it. A simple Internet connection gets you by and the main requirement as it is not business-critical, is that the cost is kept low.

Granular security can be assured though a capability known as micro-segmentation, where individual workloads are mapped to underlying resources, and security controls are applied accordingly. By mapping global business policies into local office profiles, your organisation can ensures a highly visible and tightly controlled high-performance enterprise wide area network.

62 Issue 02 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS