Sydney/Australia

The proliferation of the Internet back in the 90’s urged multi-national organizations to build wide area networks, relying on Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology-based services from Telecom service providers. Corporate applications were on-premise infrastructure, requiring network management resources; hardware, tools, and manpower were essential to scaling, although the availability of service was solely dependent on the service providers’ network. Organization’s shift towards cloud computing and application access through mobile devices is attributed to higher costs as MPLS technologies were not built for an exponential volume of WAN traffic.

In the current digital transformation era, cloud computing platforms have proven to offer both; the flexibility to scale on demand, and optimize the total cost of ownership. Overhauling the IT infrastructure for high-performance cloud computing has become imminent, which includes the underlying telecom and network infrastructure. The advent of SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Networking) has been complimentary for the lean IT infrastructure and cloud computing requirements of enterprise networks. SD-WAN functions as an overlay for organizations’ existing network solution, allowing the network control and management processes to be handled like any other application. Through a centralized control function, it intelligently routes traffic across multiple sites, optimizing bandwidth. 

SD-WAN offers compelling value propositions to organizations, for replacing the legacy MPLS-based WAN services. Listed below are the key design elements for consideration.

The software-enabled tool caters to centralized management of distributed WAN services when compared to the legacy infrastructure, which required time-consuming effort for resources to configure network devices at each site and interconnect between the branch sites and head office.  Further performance monitoring and notification of the MPLS services relied on the service provider, whereas SD-WAN tool offers monitoring capabilities to track the performance of the connectivity and take proactive actions with the service provider.

“SD-WAN leverages multiple connectivity options, including internet connections, point to point - private lines and 5G. It can direct traffic and failover between available connectivity options, whereas MPLS services rely on dedicated connections from the service provider.”

SD-WAN offers improved performance with built-in intelligence to control traffic from one location to another and re-route to the highest-performing available link, maximizing capacity and improving the user experience for SaaS and public cloud-based applications such as Office365.

SD-WAN responds swiftly to changes in bandwidth requirements, to ensure business-critical applications have minimal latency.

SD-WAN leverages multiple connectivity options, including internet connections, point to point - private lines and 5G. It can direct traffic and failover between available connectivity options, whereas MPLS services rely on dedicated connections from the service provider.

SD-WAN tool has the provision to automate the failover of services to reliable connectivity, based on the defined parameters which include; latency, packet loss, and jitter levels. This ensures higher reliability and alleviates inherent limitations in MPLS services, such as performance degradation due to bandwidth limitations, and traffic congestion on the service provider network.

SD-WAN is secure by design. Dynamic Multipoint VPN using IP-Security (IP-Sec) allows to create an end-to-end encrypted tunnel for reliable data transfer across the enterprise network. In addition, ‘boost capability’ helps to increase the data transfer rate for capacity optimization. These capabilities offset the high bandwidth cost incurred in MPLS service.

SD-WAN tool has advanced security features and cyber threat protection to function as the next-generation firewall for Information Security management. The tool further provides the capability to execute an integrity test of the circuits provisioned by the service provider, for measuring the speed and latency before deploying to production.

SD-WAN vendors provide appliances to be deployed at the data centers and/or branch offices to interface with LAN and private connections from service providers. Pilot initiatives are recommended before planning for large-scale deployment.

SD-WAN can have a high impact on business performance and offers benefits comprising the lower cost of ownership, increasing the reliability of network performance and high availability of services to augment business.