Traffic from voice and video conferencing is bandwidth-taxing, and SD-WAN solutions determine which route these IP packets should take based upon analysis of current traffic flows and frequent network testing. All traffic is routed by taking into account the predetermined priority of the application, the available bandwidth, and what other traffic is being sent.

Many SD-WAN vendors have databases in the thousands of applications. Their typical priorities, Zoom Video and CRM, generally would be at the higher end and social media at the lower end. These values can be fine-tuned as needed; some vendors allow for more granular configuration than others.

Zero-touch deployment is becoming more important, allowing an organization to ship equipment to a location and have it plugged in by an office manager so it can start working right away. In other scenarios, an email link click establishes virtual SD-WAN without further involvement from IT.

SD-WAN can be configured by the customer, delivered via an MSP, or provided as a managed service via a carrier. Often, SD-WAN is tied in with a next-generation firewall, helping to provide secure connectivity from cloud apps to end devices. Some companies include these firewalls, while others have one or more partners to choose from.

The benefits of SD-WAN make it a crucial technology, enabling business continuity and digital transformation. As organizations have migrated to teleworking on a massive scale, thanks to COVID-19, SD-WAN has proven itself as a reliable technology, enabling workers to stay productive regardless of their location, even when using poor internet links.

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Organizations with more than one location have always needed some form of wide-area network (WAN). And now enterprises of all sizes and shapes are becoming more and more distributed. At the same time, various forms of cloud services have become more widely adopted. This public cloud adoption often makes traditional solutions for corporate WANs, like managed, private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks, sub-optimal or even obsolete. More recently, the Covid pandemic and associated social distancing have accelerated the adoption of different network access technologies, including SD-WAN, in smaller home office and home education scenarios.

In addition to these fundamental shifts in the demands on WANs, the modern enterprise is more acutely aware of the need for security. It is more dependent than ever on pervasive connectivity and good network performance. This combination of trends has left IT managers scrambling for a secure method of reliably connecting their users, their data, and their applications. SD-WAN emerged to fill this growing need.

SD-WAN brings key tenets of software-defined networking (SDN) into the enterprise WAN, notably:

• Centralized control can be more efficient than distributed routing in certain scenarios.
• Centralized management can make it much easier to operate a large network than traditional box-by-box management.

We can say that SD-WAN is a concept, not a technology, because there is no single underlying protocol that defines an SD-WAN. Rather, it is an operating model enabled by various vendors’ products in different ways.

While the SD-WAN market is not yet fully mature, many enterprises have chosen to test or deploy SD-WAN solutions already. The primary drivers include hoped-for improvements in network performance, reliability, monitoring capabilities, and security, as well as cost reduction benefits.

When planning for SD-WAN deployment, multiple factors need to be considered, many of which are directly related to the specific SD-WAN product you choose. Others, such as which types of circuits to use for the physical connectivity and whether a do-it-yourself (DIY) or a managed approach to deployment and operation is more appropriate, are typically independent of the SD-WAN technology provider you select.

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