{"id":34614,"date":"2019-03-08T16:49:54","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T08:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/?p=34614"},"modified":"2019-03-08T16:49:55","modified_gmt":"2019-03-08T08:49:55","slug":"cloud-native-sd-wan-combines-the-agility-enterprise-wans-need-with-the-performance-users-demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/2019\/03\/08\/cloud-native-sd-wan-combines-the-agility-enterprise-wans-need-with-the-performance-users-demand\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud-native SD-WAN combines the agility enterprise WANs need with the performance users demand"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

IT is changing and growing at a faster pace than ever. In order to remain competitive, enterprises must be able to scale and adapt quickly. This is as true in the WAN as it is anywhere else within the enterprise. While many modern enterprises have already realized that <\/strong>SD-WAN<\/strong><\/a> is needed to meet the performance and flexibility demands required in modern business, selecting the right SD-WAN offering can be a real challenge. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While there are a number of SD-WAN solutions to choose from, only SDWaaS is uniquely capable of delivering the performance and agility required for enterprise environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s dive into the importance of agility and WAN\nperformance in the modern enterprise and explore the benefits SDWaaS with this\ncontext in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The importance of agility to the modern enterprise<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Competition between businesses and expectations from\nconsumers are greater than ever. This means that in order to thrive,\nenterprises must be able to iterate, innovate, and adapt rapidly. Whether this\nmeans adding functionality to a software product, rolling out an IoT\ninitiative, providing enhanced service to your customers (e.g. as an MSP), or\nany number of other opportunities; the costs of not being able to \u201cstrike while\nthe iron is hot\u201d are high. If you don\u2019t quickly exploit an opportunity, you can\nbe sure your competitors will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The custom hardware and the WAN as a bottleneck<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Often, IT infrastructure is at the heart of innovation.\nWhether it is driving collaboration and development, or actually part of the\nservice itself (e.g. for MSPs, SaaS apps, etc.), having the underlying network\ninfrastructure in place to facilitate your progress is a must. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, many enterprises find that core pieces of their\nnetwork and WAN infrastructure consist of customized hardware. Why is this a\nproblem? Because rollouts that depend on significantly modifying the\ninfrastructure can take months or even years. If the hardware you need is\navailable on the market, and you\u2019re aggressive in sourcing it and planning the\nrollout, a few months is realistic. If you have to wait for new functionality\nto be added by way of a hardware change, firmware update, or new operating\nsystem, time to market could realistically be measured in years. This can mean\nhuge bottlenecks preventing improvements and innovation for enterprises and\nservice providers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is this solved? By taking a software-defined approach to\nnetworking and the WAN. Doing so decouples your dependence on custom hardware\nand enables the use of commodity servers and whitebox switches. With a\nsoftware-defined paradigm, fundamental change can happen in weeks with proof of\nconcepts being done in days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How SD-WAN brings agility and performance to the\nenterprise WAN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can enterprises enable this software-defined approach on\ntheir networks? By moving away from a hardware-based approach to network and\nWAN connectivity and adopting solutions like SD-WAN and SDN (software-defined\nnetworking) to decouple their network performance from any given piece of\nhardware. SDWaaS is particularly useful here as it is a holistic WAN solution\nthat not only enables policy-based routing and the use of multiple transport\nmethods (xDSL, 4G LTE, etc.), it also helps reduce dependence on expensive and\ncomplex appliances for connectivity and security. Since it is truly\ncloud-native, SDWaaS brings the scalability of the cloud to the WAN.\nAdditionally, it is able to do so without compromising reliability as SDWaaS\nproviders offer a private, SLA-backed backbone that is supported by Tier 1\nISPs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about NFV?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At this point, if you\u2019ve been keeping up with WAN trends\nover the last few years, you may be asking where NFV (Network Functions Virtualization)\nfits in. For a time, it seemed like NFV was the tech that was going to bring\nagility to the enterprise WAN. However, disjointed standards and single-vendor\nsolutions have led to less than stellar results. The NFV of today looks very\nsimilar to managed and hosted firewalls of the past. As customers still need to\npay for and manage a number of cloud or hardware appliances, NFV does bring the\nagility and scalability enterprises need. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, where NFV failed, SDWaaS (sometimes referred to as\ncloud-native SD-WAN) can succeed. This is because SDWaaS offers a full security\nstack baked-in to the underlying<\/a> WAN infrastructure. This means, with\nSDWaaS, enterprises can maximize their flexibility without compromising their\nsecurity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SDWaaS helps enterprises avoid bottlenecks and optimize\nperformance<\/strong><\/strong>\n\nAs we have seen, customized hardware can create\nbottlenecks that stifle innovation and performance enhancements for enterprises\nand service providers. If you are dependent on hardware updates and new\nhardware rollouts in order to be able to innovate, you can expect non-trivial\nbottlenecks along the way. By shifting away from a hardware-focused paradigm\nand adopting technologies like SDN and SDWaaS, enterprises and service providers\ncan help ensure that they are capable of scaling and innovating at speeds that\nkeep them ahead of the curve in today\u2019s competitive business landscape.\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While there are a number of SD-WAN solutions to choose from, only SDWaaS is uniquely capable of delivering the performance and agility required for enterprise environments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34615,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,26],"tags":[6122,5461,5489,6653,96,4825],"class_list":["post-34614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-headlines","category-opinions","tag-sd-wan","tag-sd-wan-solution","tag-sd-wan-technologies","tag-sdwaas","tag-technology","tag-wan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}