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Network Infrastructure Magazine | Monday, March 14, 2022
SD-WAN technology entails several risks—cost reduction and management.
FREMONT, CA: Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is a feature-rich technology that combines networking, security, reporting, and management into a single platform. However, prospective users should be aware of the inherent problems and risks associated with SD-WAN deployment.
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This article addresses some of the IT teams' difficulties assessing SD-WAN suppliers.
Choosing a vendor: The first issue when implementing SD-WAN is vendor selection. Most IT decision-makers will begin their SD-WAN analysis by conducting due diligence on the leading providers. This initial stage is difficult due to the abundance of marketing in the SD-WAN product field. IT departments are inundated with marketing data implying that each product can provide digital transformation across WAN services.
Within the last few years, WAN technology has grown to include Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), interaction with key cloud providers, and a variety of capabilities that aid with application performance and diversity. While security, cloud computing, and new features enable users to work securely from any location, IT teams must examine their customers' processes to determine which vendors are best positioned to supply their services.
To address this difficulty, IT teams can describe the current state of business application flows and how the business wants to operate over the next decade. While creating this report, teams must consider how users increase their productivity by utilizing SD-WAN technologies.
IT teams are frequently hampered when making technological decisions by their previous obligations and network complexity. For example, security vendor contracts are not frequently terminated concurrently with WAN services. Teams should pick providers that integrate well with third-party security services in this circumstance. Existing commitments create difficulty in many ways, as vendors consolidate features into a single product.
Provisioning beneath the surface: It makes sense for SD-WAN to migrate away from private WAN technologies like MPLS and toward the internet as the default connectivity choice. Almost every organization is moving to a public cloud-first strategy, including SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. The SD-WAN difficulty is determining which underlay service providers are most suited to a business's locationsand employing a single IP backbone or a multi-ISP plan.
A single IP backbone makes sense for large, worldwide companies because it consolidates traffic into a single independent system, resulting in more predictable latency and jitter across applications. On the other hand, national networks are less concerned with round-trip time and may opt for a multi-ISP strategy based on individual postal codes.
However, teams should consider factors other than network performance. Traditional MPLS network operations centers are well-known for their concentration and troubleshooting capabilities, as they manage both the WAN edge and the circuit end-to-end. In general, ISPs are not as focused, which means that the vendor is responsible for troubleshooting and managing connectivity issues. Whether an IT team opts for DIY SD-WAN or managed SD-WAN, they must understand how prospective vendors provide a service-level agreement for monitoring and troubleshooting connectivity.
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