The pressure for IT to deliver at the speed of business has never been higher. As enterprises adopt the cloud and its incredible agility, the business expects IT to offer similar, extreme reactivity. While some areas of technology like servers and storage have risen to the occasion, becoming increasingly dynamic, agile and software-defined, the WAN – the path by which a company’s data and people are connected – continues to be mostly the same: hardware-bound, static and fragile. And in the digital era, this means the WAN is quite likely your business’s weakest link.
It’s no wonder traditional WANs are having a tough time meeting the demands of the modern business – a lot has changed in the decades since the technology was first designed. The shape of the network is undoubtedly more complex. The network perimeter is becoming more distributed. This is being driven by a few key factors:
Firstly, enterprises themselves have become more distributed. As businesses look for ways to accelerate growth and be more responsive to customer needs, they’re adding more locations. Employees are increasingly scattered across the globe in remote and branch office locations. Branches are now directly connected to the Internet. On-premise assets are directly tied to off-premise assets to form hybrid cloud workloads. Users in the branch are connecting to off-premise applications and users at home are connecting to on-premise applications.
Secondly, with local Internet breakouts in branch locations, the security perimeter is becoming distributed too. However, existing solutions that were designed for central locations are often too costly to be distributed in branches. Re-creating both a consistent and efficient security perimeter between on-premise assets, off-premise assets, on-premise users and off-premise users is nearly impossible with existing VPN solutions.
Thirdly, with the rise of the cloud-based enterprise, applications are richer and diverse in terms of where and how they are delivered. The traffic mix and the communication requirements are becoming richer, more dynamic and more difficult to identify. The increased use of encrypted applications and network-sensitive or bandwidth-intensive applications like voice over IP (VoIP) and video are good examples.
Lastly, in order to keep pace in a cost-effective way, IT teams are cobbling together expensive MPLS links with more affordable Internet links from DSL to fiber, and even 4G/LTE to create a hybrid WAN. But in most cases, what is saved in cost comes at the expense of performance and security.
It’s time to rethink the WAN
Legacy methods of orchestrating, configuring and managing the WAN are no longer compatible with the rapidly evolving requirements of the hybrid era. This incompatibility leads to downtime, excessive time-to-market and the need for specialized personnel at remote locations, and ultimately, high costs and lost revenue. It’s time to rethink the WAN and explore the application of SDN principles on the WAN: software-defined WAN (SD-WAN).
SD-WAN is about an ability to efficiently deliver guaranteed application performance to the modern users and workloads of the hybrid enterprise. To put it simply, SD-WAN allows for the control of the network from a single, easy-to-use, intuitive command center. At its core, SD-WAN enables for on-the-fly adjustments to be made to network performance and application delivery to meet the business’s ever-changing needs.
By leveraging software-defined networking (SDN) principles, SD-WAN enables traffic to be directed and network services to be deployed across a WAN from a centralized location — no mess and no hassle. Instead of the old router-based model, which required IT managers to make intensive CLI-based code changes to routers, network services can be assigned to different locations, users, and even apps — all with just a few clicks.
What’s more, an app-centric SD-WAN automatically identifies the applications in the network and groups them into logical categories based on business criticality, even applying network-service policies to those categories based on built-in best practices.
These benefits offer IT a broad range of possibilities: VoIP traffic can be automatically routed to the highest-quality network paths, employee traffic can be quickly segregated from that of partners and customers, recreational Internet traffic is sent through the most rigorous firewalls – and more. And IT can do it all simply and centrally, without breaking a sweat.
In today’s agile and software-defined world, businesses need to build a WAN that makes the networks more flexible and scalable to meet the needs of the business efficiently and effectively. As businesses continue to digitally transform themselves, it is time for the network to rise up and fulfill its full potential as a true enabler of business.
David Neo is Vice President, Sales Engineering, Riverbed APJ