FUTURE TECHNOLOGY

Legacy networks with hardware complexity cannot provide agility needed for digital transformation which is driving migration to SD-WANs explains Elie Dib at Riverbed Technology .

IT departments are deploying hybrid wide area network architectures , but they cannot afford to assign staff to each site . In global surveys , 89 % of executives said poor application performance has negatively impacted their work . Traditionally , IT has tackled this problem by refreshing and adding more branch routers , but this has proven to be just a temporary bandage .

The future of the wide area network is not the router . It is the softwaredefined wide area network or SD- WAN , which enables the best levels of network visibility , agility , security and performance .

The wide area network has moved on from being a simple line between datacentre and branch offices . Hybrid IT architectures now comprise multiple cloud applications and services , which need to be connected to users who are often in remote locations . As a result , managing branch office network solutions and ensuring performance is becoming increasingly costly and complex .

Providing long-term solutions for these problems requires a rethink of networking itself , in order to meet requirements of the modern business going through digital transformation . SD-WAN can offer IT a much more holistic approach

Elie Dib is Managing Director of Middle East and North Africa at Riverbed Technology

that makes orchestrating enterprise and cloud connectivity easier and costeffective . Rather than having to manage thousands of manually configured routers , management can be centralised through the use of network designs , zero-touch provisioning and easy change management .

By centralising the control function with SD-WAN , a user ’ s private network services can be extracted from the underlying IP network and the operations of that user ’ s private network service can be enabled via a centralised policy . Typically , manual tasks , such as configuration and provisioning , can be automated , and transport and technology agnostic virtual overlays can also be set up .

Although the world has changed dramatically in the last twenty years , it is safe to say that the approach to networking has not kept up . Whilst industry giants such as Microsoft are adopting a cloud-first approach , the same cannot be said for networking . IT organisations are struggling to keep up with the demands that users are now placing on the network through the traditional approach of upgrading and adding routers to branch offices and other remote locations .

SD-WAN can bring substantial value to enterprise IT . However , in order to extend the benefits of software-defined networking past the edges of the widearea network , enterprises should look beyond the wide area network to bring about meaningful transformation . As more and more enterprises are adopting a hybrid cloud strategy , it is imperative that users are able to connect securely to the cloud .

The ability to establish ubiquitous connectivity for distributed networks , which spans the wide area network and goes deeper into remote LAN networks , where user devices are connected and IT manages remote services , as well as unifying connectivity into the cloud infrastructure as a service , will be critical .

Wide area network optimisation has a positive impact on application and network performance , end-user productivity , management efficiencies and cost savings . In a distributed enterprise , the solution should also manage user access for BYOD and network segmentation at the branch local area and wide area network .

34 Issue 04 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS