Five ways SD-WAN improves your network experience

As the business world evolves it has become an interconnection of people, devices and applications, with computer networks being the central component that enables the business world to function.

Many organizations are moving applications to the cloud to serve their globalized and mobile workforce.

While MPLS and Carrier Ethernet have proven able to deliver business grade private WANs for enterprises worldwide, challenges persist with deploying them, as the time it takes to bring up new sites and interconnect sites to public or private clouds is slow and has increasingly become an issue.

Services changes, even bandwidth changes, can take weeks because they involve manual processes that are to slow for businesses that are accustomed to on-demand cloud-based applications and services.

The Internet has expanded to become the global fabric that interconnects all things, but it still operates on a best-effort model that only provides simple connectivity. Networks need to transform into an on-demand and real-time set of programmable systems that ensure application availability and performance, to meet the needs of the global enterprise.

Software-Defined WANs have emerged as a solution to address these issues.

While the networking industry is embracing SD-WANs as a way to deliver an instant and on-demand solution, SD-WAN features and capabilities are not the same across offerings from the many vendors.

Here is a look at five capabilities of SD-WAN that can improve your network experience.

SD-WAN gives you an always on branch office

Reliable access to applications is crucial for enterprises. With SD-WAN you should have continuous access to your applications from the branch office. No single outage or poor quality link should disrupt your access. Whether accessing virtualized applications, or productivity tools or running VoIP, you shouldn’t experience session disconnects or performance issues.

SD-WAN creates a reliable connection for each application

Poor link quality to applications creates frustration and reduces productivity. It’s important to have responsive and high quality links to you applications, even when there’s high latency in your connections or intermittent loss of connections. SD-WAN can mitigate the effect of poor quality connections by selecting the best available connection for each application, based on business policies, and optimize traffic over the connection to avoid outages and to maintain the best possible application performance.

SD-WAN reduces the cost of your wide area network

By using broadband connections in addition to using MPLS, SD-WAN can reduce network costs. Broadband connections are reasonably priced and provide acceptable performance. However they are not as reliable as MPLS. SD-WAN combines the two with intelligent utilization to save you money on connectivity, and eliminate outages and simplify network troubleshooting.

SD-WAN simplifies your branch office network infrastructure

In many networks WAN Optimization, firewalling and routing are delivered by individual appliances. Having separate devices is expensive and difficult support. SD-WAN should simplify your branch office, not add complexity. SD-WAN should provide a single appliance, physical or virtual, that integrates the SD-WAN functionality with WAN Optimization, security and routing. This will allow you to consolidate and simplify your branch network and reduce capital and operational expenses.

SD-WAN provides centralized control and management of network functions

SD-WAN functionality should be configured from a centralized management console. Business, network and security policies should be set once and then automatically pushed out to each branch office device. There should not be a need to log on to individual appliances or to use multiple management systems to manage you SD-WAN. Reporting should be available for all network functions and the entire network infrastructure end-to-end, including application, network, and link performance statistics. SD-WAN is proving to be a versatile and effective solution to the connectivity needs of the global enterprise. 

There are many use cases for SD-WANs from providing a complete secure, multi-site VPN service to simply providing access to off-net sites via last mile Internet broadband.

Unlike other network connectivity services, SD-WANs can use application-driven networking where application traffic is forwarded over different WANs based on QoS, Security and Business priority policies ensuring that business critical applications are reliable.

SD-WANs can provide centralized control and management automation plus a secured overlay network over multiple WANs, so enterprises worldwide can reduce the cost of WANs while having similar business grade WAN performance and security guarantees as MPLS or CE.

Choosing the right SD-WAN solution is critical to the success of your network transformation.

If you’d like to learn about the NetScaler SD-WAN solution from Citrix visit this page: NetScaler SD-WAN - WAN Virtualization and Branch Networking.