What is SD-WAN?
Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is a technology that is revolutionizing the way organizations manage and operate their WANs. As the term suggests, SD-WAN combines software-defined networking (SDN) principles with traditional wide-area network (WAN) capabilities. The result of this combination is that SD-WAN offers businesses enhanced performance, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness.
With global expansion, businesses are struggling to manage their WAN networks between offices located around the world. The increased network traffic between various branches leads to bottlenecks and businesses often experience disrupted connectivity between headquarters and branches. Additionally, traditional WAN solutions are expensive and not fully adapted to the ever-growing cloud-based applications. Therefore, businesses are now using SD-WAN, a flexible and cost-effective solution that addresses their challenges.
SD-WAN makes it easier to manage complicated networks with multiple branches by separating control functions from hardware. SD-WAN benefits have made it a popular choice for many businesses, resulting in a growing preference for SD-WAN technology. It has fundamentally transformed how businesses utilize and manage their network infrastructure, making its way as the norm for enterprise-level WAN connectivity.
Learn more about the definition of SD-WAN in this article.
Benefits of SD-WAN
Organizations enjoy SD-WAN benefits including enhanced network performance, security, and manageability. To better understand the benefits of SD-WAN, here is a detailed explanation of each benefit.
Improved Performance
The benefits of SD-WAN include elevated performance and connectivity for critical applications. Unlike traditional WAN architecture, which relies on a static set of rules for routing traffic, SD-WAN employs intelligent traffic routing. It intelligently routes traffic across multiple connections based on real-time network conditions, especially in cases of latency, packet loss, and jitter.
This dynamic traffic management optimizes performance by selecting the most efficient or superior-performing WAN connection for each application, ensuring consistent and reliable connectivity even in high-demand scenarios. This further helps IT teams avoid packet loss and latency issues, facilitating both employee productivity and user experience.
Cost Efficiency
Another SD-WAN benefit is that it significantly reduces the operating costs of an organization. At a time of increasing cloud-based applications, SD-WAN can reduce costs by leveraging low-cost local Internet access, providing direct cloud access, and reducing the amount of traffic over the backbone WAN. By utilizing multiple types of connections, SD-WAN allows organizations to leverage more affordable internet links alongside traditional MPLS connections.
This hybrid approach reduces reliance on expensive dedicated circuits, resulting in significant cost savings while maintaining or even improving network performance. It also reduces costs indirectly by helping organizations avoid costly data breaches and legal penalties through improved security and compliance.
Enhanced Security
SD-WAN benefits also touch upon cybersecurity—a crucial element in today’s digitized world. SD-WAN solutions typically offer in-built security features to protect data and secure traffic as they traverse the network. These include encryption, firewall, intrusion detection, and threat detection.
Besides, centralized management and policy-based controls enable administrators to implement consistent security measures across all network endpoints, reducing the risk of breaches and ensuring compliance with regulatory and security requirements.
Increased Flexibility and Scalability
With SD-WAN, adding new devices to the network is quick and seamless without any need for intricate reconfigurations. Also, SD-WAN enables businesses to aggregate WAN connections of any type, allowing them to connect to the cloud more effectively. As businesses grow, this scalability ensures they can handle increased bandwidth demands.
Simplified Management
Benefits of SD-WAN include simplification of network management through centralized orchestration and automation. It simplifies WAN infrastructure by using broadband to offload non-critical business apps, automating monitoring tasks, and managing traffic through a centralized controller.
Administrators can define policies, custom tailoring to application requirements, quality of service (QoS) priorities, and security protocols. Then, they apply these policies consistently across the entire network infrastructure. This streamlined approach reduces complexity, minimizes the likelihood of configuration errors, and improves troubleshooting efficiency, ultimately leading to a more agile and responsive network environment.
Sangfor SD-WAN for Your Organization
Sangfor SD-WAN is the combination of Sangfor’s leading VPN technology, integrated security, WAN optimization, and superior virtualization technology. It is designed to build a 5S branch access network for enterprises, making IT architecture simple, smart, secure, speedy, and scalable and helping enterprises increase productivity, reduce costs, and speed up their digital transformation. Its components include the Network Secure next-generation firewall and Central Manager.
Sangfor SD-WAN benefits encompass built-in security, branch status visualizations, automatic failover, improved efficiency and productivity. Learn more about Sangfor SD-WAN by visiting here.
