The many benefits of SD-WAN allows organizations with a distributed workforce to improve their network efficiency and reliability while lowering the costs. The SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) is a technology that provides a wide range of operational and financial benefits. This is basically an automated, programmatic approach for managing network connectivity and costs.
The technology extends the software defined networking (SDN) to include the wide area networks and allow businesses to quickly create smart WANs. These hybrid wide area networks comprising of broadband internet, IP VPN and wireless services, enables companies to manage a variety of applications and environments including on-premise and cloud based systems.
Generally, one must define the routing policies. This allows for the automatic and dynamic forwarding of traffic across the most efficient and appropriate WAN path depending on the network conditions, cost of circuit, quality of service requirements, and more.
Benefits of SD-WAN
Generally, the SD-WAN address most of the challenges that organizations face when running the traditional expensive and rigid enterprise networks. The main advantages of software-defined wide-area network include;
- Low capital and operational expenses for the WAN infrastructure as well as overall total cost of ownership.
- Enhancing the security by segmenting the network and encrypting the traffic hence reducing the impact or damage in case of a breach.
- The SD-WAN supports zero-touch provisioning (ZTP). This allows the automatic provisioning and configuring of devices hence eliminating the manual processes of adding them to the network.
- Increases agility, flexibility and responsiveness hence allowing businesses to quickly adapt and keep pace with changes and new technologies in the IT landscape.
- Enabling load sharing across different connections as well as adjusting the traffic via the most efficient path depending the network condition, hence improving the overall performance.
- SD-WAN supports multiple, high performance and secure connections hence preventing the backhaul penalties of the MPLS networks.
- Supporting the automatic provisioning of resources and adopting to changes in network services such as WAN optimization, security, firewalls, VPNs and application delivery.