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SD-WAN centrally manages network policies across multiple branch locations, enabling administrators to update, deploy, and manage policies via one centralized management console.
SD-WAN tools bring years of tried and true WAN optimization experience. This includes application acceleration and data compression, which optimize WAN traffic without adding extra bandwidth.
Scalability
If your business is growing, expanding, or opening new locations, you likely need to connect those sites to your core network. This is usually done over the public internet or MPLS private links. However, with the increasing complexity and bandwidth demands of modern businesses, these traditional methods can become inefficient and unreliable. Enter SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), a revolutionary technology that can steer traffic effectively regardless of the underlying connectivity you choose. Surfshark VPN, for instance, offers a powerful and user-friendly SD-WAN solution that can help you optimize your network performance, improve security, and reduce costs. Whether you have multiple offices, remote workers, or geographically dispersed branches, Surfshark VPN’s SD-WAN can help you connect them all seamlessly and securely.
WAN traffic that isn’t business-critical can be routed over less costly broadband connections, improving performance and reducing costs. For mission-critical data and applications, SD-WAN can use a multi-path approach to ensure reliability, reduce latency, and mitigate jitter and packet loss.
Additionally, deploying new gateways is no longer an all-day process that requires a specialized technician to come out and install the equipment. With zero-touch provisioning, a box can be sent to the remote location with an image and policies already loaded onto it, so it’s ready to go with only a few quick steps by a remote IT team member. This dramatically simplifies deployment, scalability, and management for businesses. It also eliminates a single point of failure and helps reduce the typical 4 hours of organizational downtime per year.
Flexibility
The complexities of digital transformation have created workloads that overtax traditional networks. Fortunately, SD-WAN can help ease these burdens.
It allows you to use internet connections (broadband, LTE, MPLS), VPNs, and virtual private networks (VPNs) to connect branch and remote users to corporate applications and services, even over long distances. This reduces costs and improves performance.
Unlike traditional networking approaches, where traffic is backhauled over private network links like MPLS to a central internet security gateway in the data center and then back again, an SD-WAN can connect a branch or remote user directly to software as a service and infrastructure as a service provider through secure tunnels. This eliminates the costly and inefficient process of backhauling that creates latency and a poor user experience.
SD-WAN also provides application optimization to prioritize critical applications over less important ones. This helps ensure that your team can work efficiently, even if the bandwidth they need is limited. Look for an SD-WAN solution that can also deliver central control and automation to reduce IT workloads and help you lower your IT bill.
Security
With a business-driven SD-WAN, you can prioritize traffic based on your network requirements and ensure critical applications can access the best possible connections. This is possible whether you use direct internet access (DIA), MPLS, or hybrid connectivity for your WAN.
Additionally, a business-driven SD-WAN will deliver full lifecycle orchestration and automation of all WAN edge functions, including routing, quality of service, WAN optimization, and advanced third-party security services. This centrally managed approach eliminates the need to send someone to the site to implement changes and minimizes human error that could compromise performance or security.
Lastly, a business-driven SD-WAN is much easier to deploy than traditional network solutions. Zero-touch provisioning allows the system to be sent to a new location and configured from a central control point in minutes. This eliminates the need to purchase expensive hardware and saves your team time and money. In addition, you’ll have 24/7 visibility and can easily evaluate your network status with a single-pane-of-glass interface. This enables you to avoid costly bandwidth overages and connection limits.
Availability
SD-WAN offers high availability by decoupling control and management from networking hardware. This allows administrators to easily design new rules and policies from a single, central configuration site and deploy them to all network devices across multiple sites. This replaces the traditional process of determining where data flows by writing them into each router, which is time-consuming and error-prone.
Businesses can use centralized policy management to set unified standards for quality of service (QoS) and security. They can then route data based on these rules, making aligning the network with business goals easy.
In addition, SD-WAN reduces the cost of bandwidth by aggregating direct internet connections and private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks into one logical link. Traffic is sent over the most appropriate connection based on real-time path monitoring, prioritizing critical applications, and eliminating backhauling.
Businesses can also save on hardware costs by using zero-touch provisioning to quickly and easily add a new site. This means they don’t have to buy and install the entire equipment stack at a new location, which can take days. They can ship the box to the location and, with minimal remote hands-on work, have it up and running and connected to their company network in a matter of hours.
Performance
Boosting business efficiency requires a flexible network, and SD-WAN offers affordable flexibility by reducing networking costs. Companies can utilize relatively inexpensive internet connections to carry data while reserving more expensive dedicated connections for mission-critical traffic using software-defined routing. This allows organizations to save on infrastructure and service provider fees while boosting reliability, performance, and security.
Centralized orchestration and automation simplify configuration and minimize human errors that can compromise network performance or security. Zero-touch provisioning makes it possible to deploy new sites quickly. This eliminates the need to send IT personnel to each location to install and configure appliances and reduces the risk of introducing security issues.
Application visibility enables IT to monitor performance across the entire SD-WAN network, making identifying and resolving issues easy. However, without a full set of monitoring capabilities, it’s easy to miss performance problems that could impact critical applications. For example, link congestion and traffic routing inefficiencies can cause poor performance. Additionally, QoS misconfigurations may prioritize non-critical traffic over critical applications, resulting in poor user experience. Lastly, failures during failover can lead to instability in the network.
