The SD-WAN Future Is Now

SD-WAN is here. It’s no longer a glimmer on the horizon. Companies are deploying it at large scales to reduce costs and bring up branch offices faster than before. Companies like Gap have already deployed more than 800 SD-WAN edge devices. Financial institutions are racing to get SD-WANs in place to replace legacy gear. The future is now.

SD-WAN technology, like that of Viptela gives customers a huge advantage in reducing costs. That’s the mantra of today’s IT departments. But SD-WAN gives so many more benefits once it is deployed. Imagine if you could put in a cheaper solution that adds significant security benefits for wired and wireless traffic, application-aware network path selection, and analytics that you can take back to your service providers for contract negotiations. You’d probably think I was a snake oil salesman, right?

SD-WAN has all these advantages and more. SD-WAN reduces turn up time for branches and makes them secure from the start. It allows segmentation of guest wireless traffic to ensure PCI compliance. It provides enough analytics about your network to make any statistics person very happy. And the ability to control how applications behave and perform is just icing on the cake.

Viptela can provide a unified solution with easy configuration that makes all your edge networking headaches disappear. Rather than forcing you to configure separate protocols and make disparate parts of your network infrastructure work together, Viptela makes everything just work. That’s the key to being able to make large scale deployments happen rapidly enough to make an impact.

IT departments don’t have enough time in the day to fight fires or troubleshoot issues. Technologies which promise to make things fast and easy must also come with the promise of being easy to learn and fast to deploy. If network professionals have to spend time learning complicated new methods of accomplishing old goals, that product will likely be left by the wayside in favor of keeping things running as they have been. Cheaper and easier can’t be more expensive in terms of human costs.

Application control is a huge benefit of a deployed SD-WAN solution. Having the ability to substitute software in place of costly dedicated links for application traffic makes management so much easier. Add in the cost savings from turning off unnecessary links and you can pay for the solution in just a few months. Being able to measure the traffic utilization of those applications is an additional benefit. If the application team is calling for a dedicated circuit for their new CRM app, you can provision a virtual circuit for them and then give them a report showing how much bandwidth is actually in use. You could even use that report to perform chargeback or other cost recovery mechanisms to match actual usage to planned usage.

SD-WAN isn’t going away in today’s networking environment. It helps enterprises of all sizes implement networking best practices in a way that is easy to manage. It also allows your organization to bring more security and analytics capabilities to the table. So if you aren’t already thinking about deploying it, head over to http://Viptela.com and take a look. You’ll find the future is closer than you think.