SD -WAN White Paper

SD-WAN

SD-WAN – also referred to as Software Defined Wide Area Network, is an application-aware, over-the-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks, irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver them.

Definitions:

SD-WAN Controller – Centralizes management, and allows network admins to see the network through a single pane of glass; sets policies for the orchestrator to execute.

SD-WAN Service Orchestrator – A virtualized manager for the network, overseeing traffic and applying/pushing policies and protocols set by network admins.

SD-WAN Edge – A device in which the network endpoints reside. Can be located in a branch office, data center, or cloud platform. Actually handles the application flows and packets affected by the policies and protocols defined by the orchestrator.

SD-WAN Gateway – A virtual cloud gateway accessible over the internet that allows the SD-WAN edge at branches to communicate in the cloud. Will handle SD-WAN traffic and control and provides an extra layer of protection by insulating applications from interruptions during circuit flapping. Because the user sessions are connected to the gateway, the sessions are kept active during the interruptions as opposed to sessions connecting directly to the cloud service.

Application Flow – A sequence of application packets from a source to a destination; in this case usually office to office, office to the datacenter, or office to cloud platform.

Internet Breakout – When one or more of the underlay connectivity services is an Internet Service, certain application flows can be forwarded directly out to the Internet as opposed to sending it to another SD-WAN device.

Policies – A set of rules that are assigned to an application flow to determine how the packets are handled

Virtual Tunnels – The virtual point to point tunnels, built over the top of an underlay connectivity service such as internet or MPLS connecting various SD-WAN Edge devices to another Edge device or to an SD-WAN Gateway.

WHY CHOOSE SD-WAN?

Overall value and functionality
Agility and speed when adding locations
Redundancy, scalability and fault tolerance
Quality of experience for critical applications
Simplification of operations
Connectivity to other cloud-based solutions
Dynamic bandwidth
Cost effective upgrades
Support whenever you need it
Application acceleration and optimization

Things to Consider

Understanding the flavors of SD-WAN and their niche focus
Understanding the customer’s own internal applications and constraints
Understanding the customer’s corporate strategy moving forward
Understanding the customer’s cloud strategy going forward
Understanding the customer’s security strategy moving forward

These are all considerations that should be discussed before deciding on an SD-WAN solution. There are so many different flavors and specific use cases for SDWAN that understanding the overall environment (the applications, digital strategy, security) is paramount to designing the right SD-WAN solution.

WHY WORK WITH US?

AGGREGATION

SD-WAN allows companies to utilize multiple Internet circuits, balance the load across them, and deliver a solid quality of experience. Aggregating the Internet circuits allows for large amounts of bandwidth, while securely connecting to additional private locations. Additional sites can be added in very short order once Internet access is acquired. What’s not to like—fast deployment, redundancy, secure connections, and solid quality of experience?

REDUNDANCY

SD-WAN solutions can combine your MPLS and Internet connections, so they don’t sit idle. Imagine SD-WAN can dynamically and intelligently route traffic over multiple circuits to improve efficiency, and if there’s a circuit failure, SD-WAN provides seamless packet by packet routing to keep you up and running. With little downtime, you and your employees can be more efficient and productive throughout the day.

ABOUT US

IT Company Inc. designs and delivers IT & communications solutions and services that help organizations execute on their strategic goals. Our focus? Every business is unique, so we start with listening to the needs of our clients, and then exceed those needs in every way.

Contact us today to learn more about what SD-WAN services are right for your business.

Businesses appreciate the cost associated with Internet circuits but worry about security if transmitting sensitive data. SD-WAN provides secure connections between sites and reduced complexities –a benefit of as-a-Service solutions!

Do you utilize or plan to utilize other cloud services, such as AWS, Azure or Google? Many SD-WAN providers connect directly to many of these cloud providers. Additionally, there are options that allow bandwidth to grow dynamically as your cloud needs change.

SD-WAN solutions can provide prioritization to the mission critical applications your business demands. Typically, providers choose the best circuit based on real-time statistics giving priority to video, voice, and other business applications. SD-WAN solutions optimize the traffic, reducing overall latency, jitter and response times, and accelerate the applications themselves.

We can also provide partnerships with companies that can virtualize out many network functions, such as firewalls, VPNs, load balancing, application acceleration, etc.

A Single Source Solution Provider for All Your SD-WAN Service Needs

Software Defined WAN or SD-WAN is becoming the mainstream choice for many organizations. Does using Internet facing circuits instead of private circuits sound intimidating? It doesn’t have to. IT Company Inc. partners with the world’s leading SD-WAN providers, and can address concerns about security, redundancy, quality of experience, and more.

Your business requires a robust communications and data network for its mission critical applications and services. Traditionally that has been accomplished by connecting private sites with MPLS or other private circuits. SD-WAN provides solutions that not only meet or exceed those offered by traditional WAN technologies, but can provide additional capabilities, such as redundancy, application acceleration, dynamic bandwidth to large cloud providers, and more. Map and scale to your business objectives faster and more effectively, with SD-WAN.

AGGREGATION

SD-WAN solutions can combine your MPLS and Internet connections, so they don’t sit idle. Imagine SD-WAN can dynamically and intelligently route traffic over multiple circuits to improve efficiency, and if there’s a circuit failure, SD-WAN provides seamless packet by packet routing to keep you up and running. With little downtime, you and your employees can be more efficient and productive throughout the day.

SD-WAN allows companies to utilize multiple Internet circuits, balance the load across them, and deliver a solid quality of experience. Aggregating the Internet circuits allows for large amounts of bandwidth, while securely connecting to additional private locations. Additional sites can be added in very short order once Internet access is acquired. What’s not to like—fast deployment, redundancy, secure connections, and solid quality of experience?

REDUNDANCY

POINTBROKER.com a Single Source Solution Provider for All Your SD-WAN Service Needs

Software Defined WAN or SD-WAN is becoming the mainstream choice for many organizations. Does using Internet facing circuits instead of private circuits sound intimidating? It doesn’t have to. IT Company Inc. partners with the world’s leading SD-WAN providers, and can address concerns about security, redundancy, quality of experience, and more.

Your business requires a robust communications and data network for its mission critical applications and services. Traditionally that has been accomplished by connecting private sites with MPLS or other private circuits. SD-WAN provides solutions that not only meet or exceed those offered by traditional WAN technologies, but can provide additional capabilities, such as redundancy, application acceleration, dynamic bandwidth to large cloud providers, and more. Map and scale to your business objectives faster and more effectively, with SD-WAN.

Eight SD-WAN Benefits

1. Better Alignment Between Your Business And Your WAN

All WAN traffic is not created equal. Important business applications must take priority over, say, entertaining YouTube videos and live streams of sporting events that workers sneak between meetings. While World Cup matches chew up the WAN bandwidth, VoIP phone calls with customers are garbled, and file transfer rates slow to a crawl. Legacy WANs have some capabilities for allocating bandwidth to applications that are most important to the business, but SD-WAN goes further by allowing you to align the uptime and performance characteristics of available data services to the importance of a work site.

Because SD-WAN enables the use of multiple types of connections – MPLS, xDSL, 4G/LTE/5G, cable modem, fiber, etc. – companies can deploy the kind of connection(s) that make sense for a given location. Business-critical locations such as a data center can be connected by active/active, dual-homed fiber connections that are managed and monitored 24x7. Less critical locations can be connected with a single xDSL line for significant cost savings. Something like a pop-up kiosk at a shopping mall can be connected using 4G/LTE and mobile clients. Regardless of the type of connectivity utilized, the SD-WAN manages all locations with a common set of routing and security policies. This provides the benefit of aligning the WAN’s usage and availability characteristics to real business needs, which in turn helps to get the best ROI from the SD-WAN.

2. Build A WAN Without MPLS

For decades, wide area networks were built solely on the backbones of MPLS circuits. While MPLS provides SLA-backed reliability and high availability, it’s also relatively expensive and inflexible. It can take months to wait for a single circuit to be installed at a branch location, or for a carrier to respond to a change request. That kind of bureaucratic delay might have been acceptable a decade ago, but it’s simply too restrictive for today’s business environment. The dream for many companies, then, is to be MPLS-free. SD-WAN does allow companies to use the Internet to replace MPLS, but this isn’t appropriate for all applications. Loss-sensitive applications, for example, will underperform over time when traversing the open Internet. These applications still need some sort of SLA-backed backbone, such as that provided by SD-WAN as a Service. With a private, affordable backbone, SD-WAN as a Service can replace a global MPLS deployment and still provide significant cost savings and networking flexibility.

3. Create A Holistic WAN Security Posture

Security is top of mind for every enterprise today. The traditional approach to implementing security has been to use discrete products deployed in technology siloes. Network teams maintained their firewalls. Branch offices deployed VPNs. Cloud applications prompted the use of cloud-based tools like a CASB (cloud access security broker). With the right SD-WAN, security can be deployed in a holistic manner to protect all resources on the network. Data center and branch locations, mobile users and cloud policy and one set of security tools. This greatly simplifies how resources can connect into one network, the SD-WAN, which is protected by one holistic security is imposed and managed, and at the same time it is more complete and thus much more effective.

4. Get High Availability Beyond The Data Center

High availability (HA) was once thought of as strictly a data center feature. HA refers to systems that are durable and likely to operate continuously without failure for a long time. MPLS has been the traditional means of delivering high uptime, especially when redundant circuits are installed, but SD-WAN has made it possible to instill HA at branch locations at a reasonable cost. There are several considerations for building high availability with an SD-WAN configuration. First, there must be redundant SD-WAN appliances (i.e., edge devices) at the branch so that if one fails, the other immediately takes over the load, and operations can continue without interruption. Next, those SD-WAN appliances can connect to redundant access lines such that, if one line fails, traffic can failover to another.

Thinking about redundancy in the Internet access layer, there can be redundant connections on just one of the SDWAN devices or on both devices. It’s all a function of just how much redundancy the organization wants to build into the system. By adding circuits in a load balanced configuration with redundant components for high availability, uptime is increased with each additional circuit. Availability can be further assured by building diverse routing into the network configuration. An organization can use SD-WAN and build these aspects of redundancy to match or even exceed the uptime and availability of MPLS circuits at a lower cost.

5. Get Better Application Performance

Different types of applications have different network requirements, and how those requirements are met have an impact on application performance. Some, like voice and video, are sensitive to jitter and packet loss, while others, like bulk data transfer, need throughput. Where an application resides, and how traffic traverses the network to reach that application, can have an impact on performance as well. For example, cloud application performance can be denigrated when network traffic has to be backhauled through a central data center before going out to the cloud.

Using the public Internet as a routing mechanism does nothing to recognize each type of application’s needs. Everything is treated the same, so some applications perform well while others clearly don’t. SD-WAN brings intelligence to application routing. SD-WAN appliances continuously monitor the latency and loss metrics of the paths among the other appliances. Then they select the optimal path for an application based on the current line conditions, the application requirements and specified business priorities. This ensures peak application performance across all types of transports.

6. Reduce WAN Opex And Capex

For decades, WAN costs have been fixed and expensive, due largely to the high cost of private MPLS circuits. SDWAN provides the opportunity to reduce or eliminate these expensive lines, replacing them in many cases with much more cost effective broadband and cellular lines. The ROI of an SDWAN can be dramatic and immediate. Companies can save up to 70% on bandwidth costs alone when replacing MPLS bandwidth with Internet bandwidth.

The reduction of security hardware can be another source of savings. When security is centralized on the SD-WAN, individual physical firewalls in the branches can be eliminated. Additional cost savings can come from the reduction in engineering and technical support time. SD-WAN appliances are generally “zero touch,” meaning that technical expertise is not necessary to deploy or configure them. A new location can be brought up in minutes without a truck roll or an on-site visit from a network engineer. All these factors can add up to significant reductions in capital and operating expenses.

7. Run The WAN Without Engineering

SD-WAN can reduce the dependence on advanced network engineering expertise, which is generally expensive and can be hard to hire. WAN experts have traditionally needed to learn very technical command line interfaces (CLIs) and arcane protocols such as border gateway protocol (BGP) and policy-based routing (PBR) protocol. Bringing up new locations often meant sending engineers to the field to install and configure equipment. While SD-WAN doesn’t completely eliminate the need for networking expertise, the demands are lessened as the management and operation of SD-WAN are greatly simplified compared to traditional WAN configurations. For example, policies are centrally managed and easily pushed out to branch locations. Edge devices are “zero touch” and can be installed and configured with practically no technical support required. And when SD-WAN is delivered as a fully managed service, the engineering burden on the enterprise is greatly reduced.

8. Proven Technology

The analyst firm Gartner, in August 2018, put SD-WAN on the “Slope of Enlightenment” in its Technology Hype Cycle for Midsize Enterprises, stating that the technology will reach the “Plateau of Productivity” in less than two years. Calling SD-WAN “an increasingly popular technology,” Gartner says that more than 6,000 of its clients already are deploying SDWAN products in product networks. The company writes: “Software-defined networking in a wide-area network (SD-WAN) enables enterprises to create simpler and more cost effective branch office WANs that map to modern application and cloud architecture. New SD-WAN solutions have introduced viable lightweight alternatives to traditional branch office routers and are better suited to the predominantly WAN traffic patterns found in today’s business environment. SD-WANs enable MSEs to shift an increasing amount of WAN traffic to internet circuits, allowing them to optimize the costs of MPLS services and create a much simpler operational environment, thus reducing time spent managing the WAN by 50% or more."

Contact us today to learn more about what SD-WAN services are right for your business.