Digital transformation is no longer a future state, or something to consider for the next financial year - it’s an initiative that needs to be woven into the very fabric of an organisation. Global connectivity is a fundamental part of the jigsaw, but when networking costs for distributed enterprise sites such as restaurants and retail stores can exceed 60% of overall IT spending, something has to give.
According to analysis by IDC, ‘the WAN needs to be reinvented’. As businesses channel technology investment to support their own digital transformation, their connectivity strategy becomes more important. Consequently, many organisations are turning to networking technologies, such as Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), to meet their rapidly growing bandwidth demands securely, and cost effectively. The trend raises some key questions:
Why Abandon the Status Quo?
The momentum behind market-shaping trends, such as IoT, continues to accelerate, putting traditional connectivity strategies under pressure. Take MPLS architectures, for example, which have acted as the foundation for Wide Area Networks around the world for many years. MPLS offers the benefits of a private network architecture that keeps corporate traffic distinctly separate from the public Internet. It adds the additional benefits of enabling classes of service, which allow for the integration of multiple traffic types onto a single physical network.
But, the challenges of building networks around MPLS when digital transformation is on the agenda are becoming significant. MPLS requires expensive routers in order to facilitate and administer the network. As a result, the cost of each new site deployment is significant due to the equipment cost and its associated support contracts and software licenses.
It’s an approach that also dictates considerable complexity in the network structure, as IT staff must maintain explicit configurations within every router. Because of its point-to-point star topology, the larger the network scales, the more exponential the complexity becomes. This burden also carries with it the cost of hiring expensive technicians who commonly require a range of specialist technology certifications.
In a landscape increasingly powered by the need for reliable and secure connectivity at the edge, and where businesses are adding huge numbers of new devices, these issues are fast becoming economically incompatible with business priorities.
Why the Switch to SD-WAN?
SD-WAN is a software-based technology used to connect remote locations to a distributed enterprise network. It works as a network overlay enabling remote sites to consolidate multiple network functions and applications over low cost broadband connections.
Being software-based, an SD-WAN can reduce the number of network devices and connections required at each location, with the result that it significantly reduces network complexity and costs. As the needs of users change, the SD-WAN can be remotely customised and reconfigured, helping to reduce administrative and management overheads.
For example, remote locations can be defined simultaneously and then kept fully in sync using centralised cloud-based policy administration inherent in SD-WAN connectivity models. This architecture helps reduce expenses and complexity while increasing network flexibility. Of particular benefit to the growing number of distributed enterprises, it can be piloted on the network incrementally on a branch-by-branch basis, mitigating concerns about network disruption, and giving users a quick way to determine the return on investment.
