Five Common SD-WAN Use Cases

Are you integrating new technologies like artificial intelligence, internet of things or enterprise mobility into your business operations? If so, you might have noticed that your wide area networks (WAN) are under pressure trying to keep up with your increased network demand. How do you address these new challenges?

Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solutions might be one way to ensure your IT infrastructure is meeting the needs of an increasingly digital operation. SD-WAN offer a central management tool that enables administrators to gain network visibility more effectively. Giving more significant control over the network, in turn, enables IT teams to improve user experience, network performance, and agility. 

Let’s walk through the top common SD-WAN use cases to dive deeper into successful applications of SD-WAN. 

1. Simplified Service Availability

SD-WAN solutions don’t rely on the traditional network’s hub-and-spoke model that results in bad application performance. Instead, branches in SD-WAN are directly connected to the data center or cloud, significantly reducing transit time, network overhead, and bottlenecks to boost application performance. With SD-WAN, enterprises can also accelerate connectivity by enabling branches to leverage optimal network transport for specific types of traffic. 

2. Application Aware Routing

Unlike destination-based routing, application-aware routing understands the application path and provides more excellent management and control to enhance the user experience. Instead of focusing on the network destination, the emphasis is on the application experience. 

Application-aware routing supports the business intent and context of how the application is used and needs to be served to the end-user, based on the business policies. 

SD-WAN uses active and passive monitoring to track path and network entities dynamically. Hence, the information is applied to the edge/ branch locations and selectively directs the application flow among optimal network paths. Traffic is automatically sent to WAN links with the required network characteristics and path conditions to support these applications in real-time. 

3. Secure and Optimized Direct Internet Access

With digital transformation efforts in full swing, branch and WAN networks are getting exhausted. Today, most employees and customers work in branch offices, significantly increasing the number of devices accessing Internet-based applications. However, the results are not as expected due to the adoption of legacy network architectures. The traditional WAN topology backhauls entire traffic to data centers causing packet latency, drops, and jitter. This also increases the cost of deployment and management. An excellent way to deal with this is DIA with SD-WAN topology.

Direct Internet Access (DIA) optimizes branch workloads while boosting application performance with robust security, resulting in more efficient and cost-effective network access. With DIA, enterprises can benefit in multiple ways, including:

• Reduced bandwidth consumption, latency, and cost savings on WAN links by offloading internet traffic from private WAN circuits
• Improved branch user experience by offering Direct Internet Access (DIA) for employees at remote locations

4. Improved Network Visibility and Control

An SD-WAN solution enables faster service delivery of crucial network management processes while streamlining network operations. This is how it does that. 

Centralized Management
Administrators gain access to the direct platform with interfaces to manage networks. This enables them to get the most value out of their network resources. Network administrators can quickly control traffic routes, application performance, and security- all from a single dashboard. 

Transport-agnostic Capabilities
SD-WAN is transport-agnostic. Therefore, irrespective of the network provider or location of network edges, you can use any transport mode. Business data can be prioritized across the network, giving you the ability to achieve top performance.

Cost Controls
Organizations must be proactive to growing network demands. Whether adopting new applications to facilitate smooth operations from remote locations or extending your network to new geographies, it is easy to understand how costs can be a huge matter of concern without visibility.

SD-WAN enables software-based management, thanks to which processes can be remotely managed, reducing time and cost.

5. Software-Defined Security

Security considerations are vital to networks. Unlike WAN, SD-WAN offers an additional security option that meets the demands of advanced applications. It is deployed end-to-end using an encrypted tunnel over any connectivity used, guaranteeing robust security to sensitive business data without affecting connecting traffic from diverse sources.

Yet, reliable encryption is not where SD-WAN stops to do the work for our customers. SD-WAN entails a full security stack including Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) and a comprehensive UTM platform with which customers can easily merge what have been two separate entities – WAN and security – into one seamless SD-WAN platform solution.

Wondering Where SD-WAN Solutions Fit in Your Enterprise?

Reach out to the experts at Telekom SD-WAN!

Our unique solutions help enterprises leverage a wide range of SD-WAN technologies to gain network visibility and control to make informed business decisions. That too, without having to invest in resource training. Enterprises of various sizes and diverse industries can utilize tuned connectivity to scale up or down based on their current network requirements. Our team helps you analyze your business requirements to ensure managed services with the highest customer satisfaction. The right time to begin is now. Get started by sharing your requirements.