The digitization of economy, heavy use of multiple public cloud applications and shifting needs of enterprise like exponential growth in the WAN’s traffic have created a new set of requirements for WAN that’s why software-defined networking (SDN) came into being for WAN, enabling enterprises to expand their use of the public Internet for critical business traffic.
SD-WAN is one of applications of SDN technology applied to WAN connections such as broadband, 4G, LTE, or MPLS which are used to connect enterprise networks – including branch offices and data centers – over large geographic distance.
“SD-WAN Infrastructure Market Poised to Reach $5.25 Billion in 2023, According to New IDC Forecast in July 2019.”
SD-WAN key players are Silver Peak, Cisco, VMware, Riverbed, Citrix, Fortinet, Aryaka, Versa Networks and Huawei.
Some vendors like Silver Peak keep their focus on accelerating Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications in the cloud. VMware’ Velo Cloud contains edge applications, orchestration, and cloud-resident gateway. Aryaka builds a global network so that companies can use WAN as Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), even outside of its point of presence. Incumbent vendors like Cisco and Riverbed focus more on WAN optimization and edge WAN offerings.
The top SD-WAN benefits are:
MPLS provides excellent quality of service in terms of avoiding packet loss and keeping a business-critical traffic flowing without any interruption while downside with MPLS is cost of the bandwidth moreover MPLS is not built for world of cloud. With SD-WAN, geographic boundaries are minimized and features such as visibility, scalability, performance and control is enhanced. SD-WAN comes with no bandwidth penalties unlike MPLS. Greatest selling point for SD-WAN is the ability to cost-effectively mix and match network links according to content type and priority and unifying secure connectivity providing end-to-end encryption across the enterprise network however businesses that have specific connectivity requirements still demand MPLS. Most of the SD-WAN deployments today still have MPLS as one of the underlay transports.
There few key points to consider when choosing deployment model: