If you keep track of IT technologies, you may have heard about SD WAN, a relatively new networking tool that has exploded in popularity over the past few years among businesses looking to improve their networking capabilities.
While there’s plenty of useful and up-to-date information on SD WAN online, you might also run into lots of articles that provide hype and very little else, claiming that it’s essential for every business without really explaining why…
In this article, we’ll take a look at what SD WAN can actually do for your company, and explain the reality of some of the myths surrounding this technology.
Explaining SD WAN
It’s important to establish the basics of what SD WAN can do before we start getting into the potential benefits of the technology, and it all comes down to the second part of the acronym.
Pretty much any business with multiple locations has a Wide Area Network (WAN) one way or another. Basically, a WAN is a series of locations that all connect to one centralised IT provision that usually provides access to applications for the other sites.
These additional sites tend to have their own dedicated internet connections that can be configured into a VPN (or Virtual Private Network), which provides a secure connection even over the internet.
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As well as being the main location where IT professionals are based, the HQ location also serves as the primary hub for a company’s IT services and applications.
Unifying Your Business Network
When you implement SD WAN into your network, you aren’t actually altering anything at the core of the WAN itself. Instead, SD WAN functions as an overlay that sits on top of your existing network, allowing your IT staff to control how devices interact with one another in a much more efficient way.
This means that your devices all become much more unified, all easily controlled from the same central interface that allows for control over the entire network.
While this might be convenient from a business point of view, this isn’t the only benefit that SD WAN can offer you company. Devices use a huge range of languages when they send data over your network – for example, data sent over a wireless cellular connection is dealt with differently to data from a traditional wired connection. SD WAN can virtualise this language – in essence, different connections can be used together, even if they’re usually handheld through completely different methods.
Think about the potential flexibility of this for a moment, and you can see what a huge change this could be for all kinds of businesses.
What Can SD WAN Do For You?
So, now that you know the basics of how SD WAN works, you can start to consider the various business benefits that you could see from implementing this technology.
However, it’s worth mentioning that these benefits are only likely to apply if you use SD WAN correctly – without an expert hand guiding you, it could actually hold you back from getting the most from your network and layers of complexity that cannot be effectively managed.
Easy Class of Service (CoS) Alterations
Many businesses nowadays use applications every day that are vital to the running of their company – if you’re one of them, then SD WAN might be for you. An SD WAN system includes a pathway control system, meaning that your most important and highest priority traffic can travel through your network even if another application is creating congestion. Rolling out these CoS preferences is easy with SD WAN, as you can quickly change them rather than having to alter each individual device.
Quick and easy CoS changes are hugely important for businesses that rely on certain applications – however, there are a few limitations. While these adjustments are convenient, they aren’t quite as in-depth as those from an MPLS system. Where an MPLS can allow you control over minute details, SD WAN is more simplified and general – although it may one day be just as precise.
Centralized Network Security
As well as centralizing your support and maintenance, an SD WAN system can also provide the ability to roll out security across your network from a single location – everybody is aware of the importance of keeping your data secure and being able to do this from one provision that constantly maintains your security is vital.
You’re probably aware that network security used to primarily be dealt with through firewalls at each physical location. This no longer needs to be the case – because an SD WAN system lets a business roll out an application to almost any site, security resources can also be stored centrally. You’ll have to find a provider who can design a new security solution to achieve this, but if you manage to, keeping on top of security will become so much simpler.
Straightforward Expansion To New Sites
As SD WAN allows you and your IT team to control every device connected through the same universal language, bringing new sites onto your network can be made much more straightforward.
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Besides gaining access to devices that are outside the office on another site, you can also get rid of language barriers that might stand between communication types. If you wanted to use a series of 4G SIMs in a business router to provide a new site with the internet, for instance, you can use SD WAN to achieve this even if you also have traditional circuits and broadband connections somewhere else.
However, implementing an SD WAN system can’t solve all of the issues that come with getting a new site off the ground. Although doing away with the problem of different connection types is useful, you still need to physically plugin and configure all of the necessary devices – however, if you can get someone on the site to sort this out for you, then you can still save valuable time that would otherwise be wasted waiting around.
