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WIDE-AREA NETWORKING), it is important to
have a grasp of wide-area networks (WANs) gener-
ally, as well as an understanding of what it means to
shift technology from hardware to software. WANs
let companies share data between headquarters
and data centers, as well as with their remote branch
offices, employees, partners, and customers. But
WAN technology exists inside expensive hardware,
so WANs are not agile in terms of innovation and new
business demands.
SD-WAN peels off the hardware and extends the
capabilities of the WAN software. By doing so, it en-
ables the technology to solve a lot of the challenges
that traditional WANs couldn’t address. It also saves
money by allowing companies to combine cost-
effective broadband connections, such as the public
Internet, with 4G and 5G wireless technology.
With SD-WAN, an organization can shrink the time
it takes to make changes to a branch office network
by 50% to 80%, according to research firm Gartner.
This time savings is one way SD-WAN is more agile
than traditional WAN. Companies can add native se-
curity measures inside the network, such as encryp-
tion, and save money that would otherwise be spent
to bolt security onto a WAN separately. As a result,
the implementation of SD-WAN is gaining momentum.
Just consider that 61% of global end users will add
SD-WAN in the next two years, according to business
consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.
SD-WAN Adoption Drivers
There are a number of reasons that the market for
SD-WAN is growing globally. Among them are the
need to reduce the complexity of WANs, the rise
in popularity of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD)
phenomenon, and the growing adoption of the
Internet of things (IoT), which connects devices, sen-
sors, or products to a network. The acceleration of
mobile data traffic and the increasing use of network
virtualization technology, or moving networking into
software, also play key roles.
SD-WAN enables an enterprise to automati-
cally unite various network connections, including
mobile wireless, the public Internet, and multiprotocol
label switching (MPLS), while simplifying the WAN
and making it more robust. For example, the public
Internet offers a wider pipe for data to travel in than
MPLS does, while 5G will provide many times more
bandwidth than both. SD-WAN can add security to
the public Internet to protect enterprise applications
while they use it. And 5G will enable SD-WAN to man-
age policies and applications for mobile users and IoT
devices that live on the network edge.
SD-WAN also complements and completes
the software virtualization journey, which started
with data centers and servers and is making its
way through the network using software-defined
networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization
(NFV). (SDN reduces the hardware costs of running a
network. NFV makes it possible to replace hardware
such as firewalls with software versions, which allows
the addition of these tools more easily.) Without SD,
TO UNDERSTAND SD-WAN (SOFTWARE-DEFINED
SHIFTING
FROM HARDWARE
TO SOF T WARE
WITH SD-WAN
As more employees depend on
their own devices and the IoT grows,
companies are looking for the speed
and security SD-WAN c an o ff er.
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