Adoption of SD-WAN in the digital transformation

There are several techniques that IT teams have applied in the management of networks with the purpose of getting always the most out of the bandwidth and most efficiently routing data traffic. Digital transformation, explosion of data traffic from applications to cloud and the need for homogeneous network performance, including for remote connection, are accelerating the process of adoption of SD-WAN, the last generation software-based wide network technology, which is actually becoming the solution.

Many companies have already replaced their routers with SD-WAN devices and the annual growth of SD-WAN market share is experiencing a large deployment, with an accelerated increase.

SD-WAN is now in a maturation phase and said accelerated growth is allowing to adapt to new market expectations. Its explosive growth is due to SD-WAN’s ability to allow the use of a combination of several types of access in one location and, in this way, to provide more uptime and more available bandwidth at a lower cost compared to traditional network services.

The implementation of SD-WAN also benefits applications that are sensitive to speed, latency and responsiveness. SD-WAN is revolutionary thanks to its ability to identify the nature of the flows, to prioritize them and deliver them to any company’s headquarter with the same homogeneity of performance, and, last but not least, through a unique management interface.

While inherited WANs’ advantage was the simplicity in being managed, SD-WAN layer provides agility, efficiency and better performance in addition to complexity, thus requiring new skills from IT teams.

With SD-WAN, security of data flows and direct access to cloud services from remote sites require a change in network architecture and route selection, so you must first think about security when you are adopting it and thus integrating it to implementations, access to the cloud, virtual instance container services, etc.

Network virtualization has made monitoring more complicated, as IT teams must go beyond devices and connections, and study network applications and topologies in different layers. Network support services, such as those offered through the Ikusi Once Operations Center, have an advantage in being able to easily provide an end-to-end monitoring from their monitoring portal. From a broad perspective, SD-WAN is well positioned as a strategic enabler for companies.