Businesses now, more than ever, need to ensure that branch sites are all connected and have the same resources to ensure customer service levels remain constant across sites.

As internet usage has ballooned over the last decade, businesses have started to move to cloud-based models of working and many are starting to realise that traditional WAN’s are not providing the speeds and ‘always connected’ service that they used to.

As enterprise applications migrate from the corporate data centre to the cloud, private line connections such as MPLS have proven to be overly rigid and expensive. With greater reliance on the Internet, the necessity to achieve “cloud speed” is better accomplished by integrating broadband services into the WAN transport mix.

Legacy WAN's

Legacy WAN’s typically use a hub and spoke model, where branches all connect to a central hub to access business applications, however this method can often create bottlenecks during peak times, as latency increases significantly when accessing cloud-based applications through the hub. Bottlenecks and network congestion can also lead to the loss of data packets, which pressures the network even further by having to resend the data, again increasing latency. This latency in turn, produces a poor user experience and can also increase costs, as enterprises are forced to buy more bandwidth to overcome these roadblocks.

Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) negate these issues and increase both performance and efficiency by efficiently identifying and forwarding data to the destination through the most appropriate means. This reduces latency and packet loss, therefore increasing the users’ quality of experience. SD-WAN is also able to bond separate transport links, such as MPLS, broadband and 4G, to create a single overlay that is managed centrally.

Tunnel Bonding

This amalgamation of transport methods such as MPLS and broadband, known as Tunnel Bonding, enhances the dynamic direction of application “Is SD-WAN the ultimate Wide Area Network solution? ”traffic over the available connections and supports packet-based load sharing for higher application availability. As such, Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) complement the existing network and create a more efficient

infrastructure that does not compromise on security, speed or reliability.

Tunnel Bonding is only possible if the SD-WAN can quickly identify the type of data being sent. Wavenet’s SD-WAN offering uses First-IQ technology to classify the data from the first packet sent, directing the information almost instantly. This is known as Path Conditioning and can be customised by the client based on the performance requirements of the application in question. Therefore, users have the flexibility to determine which data should be prioritised and which networks are used for specific types of data across the WAN and change these preferences if the need arises.

One hidden benefit that Path Conditioning presents is that SD-WANs can actually reduce a company’s reliance on ISP’s. If an outage on one route occurs, the network can dynamically change to another transportation method seamlessly, reducing the reliance on ISP’s to promptly fix the original problem. Businesses no longer have to raise tickets and fight with sub-standard services whilst waiting for the fix – they may not even realise there’s an issue in the first place as the SD-WAN recognises the issue and re-routes the information accordingly.

Zero Touch Provisioning

Another key differentiator of SD-WAN is Zero Touch Provisioning. An SD-WAN appliance can be deployed in seconds by a non-technical employee as the appliance is pre-configured by the supplier, and once connected to the network, is authenticated and registered in seconds, ready for use.

These key innovations of SD-WAN enable enterprises to deliver predictable end-user experiences across the business, optimise performance of cloud-based applications and save money at the same time. While some basic SD-WAN technologies provide the potential to lower WAN costs, they do not provide the resiliency to secure the data from end-to-end, mitigate the application performance impacts of latency nor do they increase bandwidth efficiency. Therefore, finding a provider that has both experience and expertise in the technology is vital to ensuring your business evolves through SD-WAN adoption.

Why Wavenet?

Your business needs to be able to flexibly secure and connect users to applications via the most cost-effective connectivity available.

Wavenet’s SD-WAN solutions augment and replace MPLS networks with secure broadband Internet connectivity, dramatically reducing WAN costs and complexity.

Benefit from unprecedented levels of visibility, control and security, whilst improving application and network performance.

At Wavenet, we future-proof technology. Protecting your business for today and tomorrow. Our SD-WAN solutions do just that, making your business brilliant.