SD-WAN

With connectivity critical to the modern enterprise, it's time to consider moving to SD-WAN

SD-WAN solutions best meet the needs of modern workflows while supporting legacy systems, offering service provider independence, and giving you control of your network.

The local and secure Intemet breakout capability ensures access to cloud-based systems such as Office365, Salesforce, Gmail, and other SaaS workloads is direct from each site. This ensures minimum latency and maximum availability, and reduces the reliance and spec of the primary Internet injection in terms of bandwidth, resiliency, and hardware requirements.

Cloud connectors enable the full SD-WAN experience to SaaS platforms, including path management, bandwidth bonding across multiple paths, and best-path selection for cloud workloads without requiring a dedicated SD-WAN appliance within the cloud environment.

Legacy applications retain their private WAN-like connectivity between end-users and data centres. They enjoy higher throughput with multiple bonded links from the best local service providers, using any available technology including fibre, copper, radio (Wireless ISP), 4G/5G, and satellite-based services. SD-WAN also enables security enforcement at every site, ensuring compliance is maintained. By performing this at the site edge, costs for high-throughput data centre enforcement equipment can be reduced or eliminated, and backhaul bandwidth requirements may be reduced substantially.

SD-WAN offers:

• Increased network resiliency and performance
• Service Provider independence - due to the advanced network management functionality of the enterprise-grade SD-WAN devices, it's possible to combine the use of UFB (fibre) internet links and 4G/5G connections from multiple service providers, as well as - or in place of - traditional one-vendor MPLS WAN circuits. This means any kind of network connection that's available at a site can be used to provide network services. This approach avoids expensive nationwide or international WAN circuit contracts, utilising fit-for-purpose links instead
• Increased network data capture and monitoring - SD-WAN provides a significant increase in monitoring and performance metrics, which can then be used for network performance monitoring and issue diagnostics. IT and their network support partner can delve into very detailed performance metrics of the SD-WAN network, which in turn will allow specific tuning of the network for each site while taking into account the sites specific location and requirements
• Consolidated networks - the implementation of an SD-WAN enables simplified joining of all networks within a group of companies, nationally and/or internationally. This allows centrally-controlled access to shared resources while enforcing strict separation where required
• Flexible inter-connectivity with partner organisations - extending connectivity into partners can be as easy as deploying a virtual appliance to get secure,
  robust connectivity with clear demarcation of responsibilities between parties
• Future-ready platform - SD-WAN allows future-use cases to be supported, such as segmented networking for corporate and guest Wi-Fi, automation networks and specialist requirements. Not only that, but local internet breakout will allow some applications or services to route directly from the site, reducing reliance on the data centre services and networking

WAN provides highly-available guaranteed services which remain a key component of an SD-WAN solution. We often build SD-WAN networks atop existing WAN services, alongside Internet services at sites.

SD-WANs and traditional WANs are complimentary. They make the most sense in combined solutions where WAN service prices are not a barrier - a situation that varies substantially country-to-country around the world.

Where WAN services are equally as affordable as Internet links, using a traditional MPLS WAN service can offer the strengths of both services to benefit our customers, because:

• MPLS WAN services provide a high-availability path, single box enabling high availability where fail-to-wire-capable devices are deployed
• SD-WAN extends the WAN connectivity to provide local Internet breakout, link aggregation, per-packet routing for resilient, best performance connectivity to your data centre and cloud workloads. Secure network separation allows multiple traffic types to share the SD-WAN tunnels. For example, enabling guest wireless traffic to be carried to a data centre securely for content inspection, while trusted corporate Internet devices are permitted to directly access specific SaaS services directly from the site's Internet connections

In locations where WAN costs are substantially offset from Internet costs, Internet-only SD-WAN solutions can provide substantial cost savings.

SD-WAN networks offer several substantial advantages compared with traditional WANs, including:

• De-coupling service providers from your network connectivity, allowing a mixture of providers to be used in order to achieve the best price, performance, and capability at each site
• Strong data encryption for security of traffic in transit across all links
• Multi-link capability with per-packet routing capability for immediate response to underlay link congestion, failure, or poor performance
• Bonding of links, providing increased bandwidth and per-packet path selection based on link performance and traffic type for maximum performance of critical traffic workloads, such as voice, video conferencing, and mission-critical applications
• Duplication of critical traffic across multiple links to ensure delivery of all packets, even packets lost in flight due to a mid-path failure
• Ability to implement strict separation of traffic for mixed-trust network traffic profiles, ensuring security is not compromised through a shared medium when backhauling traffic to data centres for security screening
• Support for local Internet break-out to enable direct connectivity to selected cloud services (SaaS, cloud proxies, etc) from the site without backhauling to a central or regional data centre
• (optional) Edge security capability with on-board firewalling or virtual firewall appliances from leading firewall vendors to compliment and extend any existing deployments
• Ultimate mobility, providing full-service network connectivity through secure, portable, managed equipment across any available network links including copper, fibre, cellular, satellite, and P2P/P2MP wireless
• Hitless underlay network upgrades, allowing live replacement of links at your sites without impacting operation
• Detailed monthly reporting showing the performance of the underlay network and overlay networks