End-to-End Observability with SD-WAN: Transforming Network Insights into Business Value
Over the past decade, enterprises raced to adopt cloud-first strategies in pursuit of speed, scalability, and innovation.
Explore the Benefits of SD-WAN: 5 Key Use Cases for CIOs
In todayβs digital landscape, organizations face unprecedented demands for reliable, scalable, and secure network connectivity.
Future of SD-WAN: Emerging Technologies & Trends 2024
In todayβs digital landscape, organizations face unprecedented demands for reliable, scalable, and secure network connectivity.
National Co-operative Bank
Challenge
- The existing setup had non-standard and EOL CPEs in multiple branch locations.
- No fallback option across several locations
- Rising network woes hindering the customerβs critical operations
- Decentralized network management and fragmented visibility made it difficult to control application traffic, troubleshoot issues, and enforce security at individual sites.
Solution
- Tech refreshed and streamlined the entire network with Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN solution.
- WAN Link consolidation with active-active architecture and auto-failover.
- Complete managed services for both links & SD-WAN solution
- Intelligent traffic controller offered real-time visibility and centralized control, empowering IT teams to optimize application performance and ensure critical operations reliability.
Impact
- Single ownership with Sify ensured seamless installation and 24×7 monitoring & management.
- Application based routing & QoS with rate limiting for selected applications.
- Zero touch unified policies across pan India locations.
- Digital transformation for the customer resulting in cost savings, efficiency, and growth.
Evaluating SD-WAN technology: Is it the right choice for your enterprise?
SD-WAN presents several advantages for businesses. Among the principal benefits is enhanced agility, enabling enterprises to efficiently create and manage virtual networks. This facilitates the scaling of networks as required, resulting in superior security and performance.
The future of enterprise networking: Exploring the benefits of SD-WAN
The conversation around networking solutions has reached a critical juncture, and software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) have become central to this discourse. The SD-WAN market is projected to reach USD 13.7 billion by 2027, growing at a compounded rate of 31.9% annually. As enterprises demand agile, built-for-purpose, future-ready, cost-effective, and secure networking solutions, SD-WAN represents a preferable alternative to the limitations of traditional networking solutions. This article delves into the transformative business benefits of SD-WAN, its advantages over traditional WAN technologies, and why enterprises must take immediate notice.
What is SD-WAN and how has it evolved?
Consider this scenario: A retail chain with stores in multiple cities, each running different promotions, handling distinct inventory, and serving diverse customer needs. How do they ensure that all of their branches communicate efficiently with the headquarters and with each other? How do they safeguard sensitive data that is exchanged over their network?
SD-WAN emerges as a game-changing solution in these contexts. It leverages software-defined networking (SDN) to establish a more agile and responsive network ecosystem. It dynamically optimizes WAN performance, delivering an exceptional user experience.
Traditional WAN vs. SD-WAN
Traditional WAN architectures offer robust stability, compatibility with legacy systems, and regulatory compliance. Through high-quality connections like MPLS, they guarantee performance where it is critical. Being a widely adopted technology, many organizations have the in-house expertise to manage them efficiently. On the other hand, they are known for their rigidity and inefficiency, often requiring a lot of manual configurations. The lack of centralized management is also a major drawback. All of this results in higher costs, poor performance and lack of scalability.
SD-WAN revolutionizes this space by offering significant WAN optimization. SD-WAN shines in its ability to offer agile, cost-effective, and scalable networking solutions with centralized management. Leveraging software-defined networking, it optimizes traffic routes, prioritizing essential applications for enhanced performance and reliability. Additionally, built-in security features, such as end-to-end encryption, fortify the network, making it an alternative to traditional WAN technologies.
Organizations adopting SD-WAN can expect to reduce networking costs while significantly improving their bandwidth. Its fast, reliable, and secure network can handle any unprecedented surge in users. Centralized management and better visibility keep diverse locations connected efficiently.
Sifyβs Managed SD-WAN: Features and benefits
Sify, a recognized niche player in the Gartner Global Managed Services Magic Quadrant, offers a cutting-edge managed SD-WAN platform, developed in collaboration with top OEMs. Sify SD-WAN helps enterprises to meet the evolving network requirements with unmatched agility, security, and scale.
- Improved performance:
Superior application steering, intelligent routing and application prioritization result in accelerated performance, reduced latency, and enhanced user experience.
- Cost savings:
SD-WAN brings down hardware costs and optimizes bandwidth and network assets utilization, helping to derive the best long-term ROI.
- Simplified management:
Centralized control, policy management and automation simplify network management, reducing manual configurations and enabling efficient scaling. Management dashboards offer granular views based on business intent.
- Enhanced security:
SD-WAN security benefits include bolstered overall network security, encrypted traffic and secure connections for remote offices.
- Application awareness:
SD-WAN excels in application-aware dynamic bandwidth allocation, particularly useful in high-demand scenarios. Pre-configured SD-WAN policies can immediately identify and prioritize latency-sensitive traffic to ensure there is no degradation in quality.
- Automatic failover:
SD-WAN’s intelligent algorithms detect congestion or failure on the primary connection, and they automatically switch traffic to a secondary connection, ensuring uninterrupted user experience.
For more insights into a best-practices-driven SD-WAN implementation, click here to learn how Sify’s SD-WAN services combine robust performance with cost-effectiveness.
Emerging trends: The future of SD-WAN
SD-WAN as-a-Service: Managed SD-WAN deployments are growing rapidly, with more enterprises choosing to outsource WAN management to specialized service providers. By 2020, this number had risen to nearly 50%, from just 8% of deployments in 2017. There has been a noticeable shift towards offering SD-WAN as-a-service, with businesses able to adopt this technology without hefty upfront investments.
SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): When integrated into a SASE framework, SD-WAN benefits from an additional layer of security, which makes policy-based, secure access to network resources efficient and highly secure. For example, SD-WAN enhances secure remote access by providing encrypted pathways between remote locations and central networks. To add to this point, the focus on zero-trust security models further boosts SD-WAN’s credentials as a secure networking solution, by ensuring that all traffic is verified before access to the network is granted.
SD-WAN and Cloud: Traditional WAN architectures often struggle to efficiently route cloud-bound traffic, leading to suboptimal performance and potential security risks. SD-WAN dynamically routes traffic based on application type, quality of service requirements, and network conditions. It can identify the most efficient path to a particular cloud service and optimize the route for performance, reliability, and security. Furthermore, SD-WAN solutions often have native integrations with major cloud service providers. Such βcloud on-ramp” capabilities empower SD-WAN for rapid and secure cloud access.
SD-WAN and AI: AI-driven automation is enhancing SD-WAN by enabling smarter traffic management and improved security through anomaly detection. By integrating AI and machine learning, SD-WAN becomes capable of intelligent network optimization and predictive analytics. A unified approach (often enabled by a single management console) consolidates heterogeneous networks and traffic onto a single platform for easier management and also serves as a rich source of network and security data.
SD-WAN and the Edge: SD-WAN enables near-real-time data processing and analysis at the source, reducing latency and boosting application performance. Its dynamic traffic routing capabilities also enhance efficient data handling at distributed edge locations, allowing organizations to deliver timely insights and actions.
Conclusion: Key considerations for implementing SD-WAN
SD-WAN will play a pivotal role in the next wave of digital transformation. Organizations that are considering the switch should begin by assessing their needs and choose an SD-WAN solution or a service provider who can offer the full suite of capabilities suited to these needs.
Sify delivers a managed SD-WAN platform that enables the network agility and security needed by the modern-day enterprise. Sifyβs SD-WAN platform supports customersβ network needs across a multi-service provider and multi-media environment. Learn how you can empower your network with our SD-WAN services. Learn more
What is SD-WAN and why do you need it?
To understand the importance of connectivity, let us imagine a day without it. Internet and phone lines are down. Your employees cannot access their mail; your offices cannot make or receive any calls; everyone from the CEO to the middle manager is left twiddling their thumbs as all their cloud hosted data and files are unavailable AND most importantly all your customer-facing applications are offline, turning away innumerable present and potential customers!
That reliable and highly available connectivity (Internet and telephony) is the lifeblood of the business world is irrefutable. In the present hyper-competitive scenario, organizations are increasingly turning to the latest technologies to achieve the best connectivity solutions at the most affordable prices. SD β WAN (Software defined β Wide Area Network) is the newest innovation to optimize WAN technology for faster, flexible and cheaper business connectivity.
SD β WAN explained
Enterprises have been relying on WAN networks to connect their branch offices; to ensure uninterrupted connectivity to remote locations they had to invest heavily in WAN infrastructure and bear the resulting maintenance costs. SD β WAN changed the landscape completely, allowing enterprises to only pay for the functionalities they require with their entire CAPEX investment amounting to small routers.
SD (Software defined) WAN is derived from the Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology, it utilizes software and virtualization technologies to create a WAN network that delivers faster, simpler and cost effective connectivity to businesses. SD βWAN achieves this byΒ decouplingΒ network software controls from the underlying hardware.
According to Gartner, SD-WAN has 4 main characteristics β it must be able to support multiple connection types, it must be capable of dynamic path selection, must be easy to configure and manage and should be able to support VPNs, and third party services.
So how does SD-WAN benefit businesses?
Application-driven technology
Applications are becoming increasingly complex and varied. The needs of these next gen applications can only be met with the flexibility and speed provided by SD-WANβs use of hybrid networks, which provides secure access and fast connectivity at remote locations.
Security
Enterprise WAN networks are now open to a growing number of users accessing it from multiple points and from multiple devices. In such a scenario, security has become a weak point for WAN networks. SD βWAN provides enhanced security, delivered centrally via an API to cover your entire WAN landscape with comprehensive security solutions such as encryption and app firewalling.
Quick to deploy and easy to manage
One of the main advantages of SD-WAN is its ease of use and simplicity; it can provide extremely dependable connectivity to remote locations, which can be deployed within a few minutes and can be easily managed.
Cost efficient
Traditional WAN networks relied on expensive hardware which were seen as a necessary cost of doing business. With cloud-enabled connectivity, SD βWAN delivers enterprise-grade services without any CAPEX investment. With a number of service providers offering varied and competing packaged service offerings, businesses can now pick the functionality they need and pay for what they use.
Centralized control
Network managers have complete control and overview of their entire SD WAN network and all its components. This allows them to monitor the network in its entirety, optimize network usage and ensure centralized implementation of operational and security policies.
Whether you need to connect your HQ to remote branches or connect Data Centers across your organization, SD-WAN hasΒ transformed the network landscapeΒ by providing premium, secure, and simple cloud-enabled WAN connectivity.
With its obvious benefits, it is hardly surprising that SD WAN adoption is predicted to grow dramatically.By the end 2019, 30% of enterprises are expected to deploy SD-WAN technology,up from less than 1% today.
With the industry revenue expected to touch $6 billion by 2020, service providers are trying to attract new customers by offering a variety of SD-WAN based innovative services, which range from NaaS (Network as a Service) to specialized WAN appliances to cloud based WAN solutions. And as their legacy WAN technology comes up for technology upgrades, businesses will certainly consider these options.
Sifyβs converged ICT ecosystem β comprising infrastructure and service offerings for cloud, telecom and Data Centers, allows it to offer enterprises end-to-end network services. Our SLA backed services will transform your business connectivity with enhanced network availability, reliability, performance and security.
