FINAL WORD
The most critical step in choosing
the right solution for any given
enterprise is understanding at a
high level how they want to manage
their SD-WAN.
Today there is certainly no shortage
of challenges for businesses
managing and adapting their
enterprise networks. Given
Digital Transformation drivers including IoT,
mobile networks, remote workforces and
cloud, networks must be more intelligent
and adaptive then ever – able to support
new use cases, access types and topologies
without sacrificing performance, security
or latency – all while enabling the teams
managing them to keep their costs low.
In this world, SD-WAN is increasingly
becoming the networking solution of choice
for modern enterprises – so much so that
IDC predicts that the market for SD-WAN
will reach US$5.25 billion by 2023 in their
2019 SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast.
At its simplest, SD-WAN is a softwarebased
solution that simplifies management
of a business’s WAN to optimise
performance and flexibility while keeping
operational costs low. The main drivers
for SD-WAN adoption include: 1) giving
a CIO more control and insight over his
WAN network, 2) increasing the agility of
the WAN network, 3) ensuring the WAN
network evolves with changes in traffic
topology, including increased traffic flowing
to SaaS cloud via the public Internet and
4) being able to scale bandwidth costeffectively,
especially in areas with limited
competition among incumbent network
service providers.
In contrast to traditional networking, the
customer is able to monitor their network
deployment, near real-time performance,
configuration, congestion, traffic-steering
policies, applications involved and more
through their SD-WAN. It addresses
common pain points for modern business
networks, including quality of service and
security and meets requirements of today’s
decentralised, geographically spread, cloudcentric
networks.
It is critical for key decision-makers
in the business to understand the exact
requirements of the organisation and to
choose, deploy and correctly use the most
appropriate SD-WAN service.
Choosing the right SD-WAN
solution for your business
The most critical step in choosing the
right solution for any given enterprise is
understanding at a high level how they want
to manage their SD-WAN. What kind of
support is needed from the supplier, given the
IT resources available within the business?
For certain very large corporations, a
‘DIY’ approach to deploying and managing
an SD-WAN solution may be considered.
The DIY model involves businesses buying
SD-WAN technology directly from the
vendor and deploying and managing their
SD-WAN solution in-house, giving them
full control and visibility of the network.
However, building a complete SD-WAN
architecture across multiple locations and
network access types with multiple vendors
is a complex task and it is essential that a
business adopting this approach have an
IT department with the required skills and
experience to design and manage their SD-
WAN solution internally – including dealing
with potentially tens of different local loop
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
INTELLIGENT
TECH CHANNELS Issue 29
65