Over the years, enterprises have used the Wide Area Network (WAN) in their communications. However, the traditional WAN had many limitations, including security and cost issues. A newer and better network was built to address the limitations of WAN. It even expanded the area coverage, more than the traditional WAN could cover. This new network, whose development was based on the broad idea of Software Defined Networking (SDN), changed the game in the networking field. The new network was named the Software Defined Wide Area Network (sd-wan) after the very idea it was developed.
Advantages of the SD-WAN
The network has proved to be beneficial to enterprises across the world. Here are the advantages of using the web.
- Resilience– The network can detect outages in real-time and automatically switch over to the working links.
- Quality of service– The network offers quality service through faster delivery of results. It achieves this by prioritizing bandwidth to the most critical applications.
- Security– Communication in the network is always secure. This is usually due to Internet Protocol security (IPsec), providing encrypted communication.
- Application optimization– This is achieved through storing previously accessed data to speed up access in the future.
- Self-Healing Networks– To avoid network issues, you can incorporate AIOps (Artificial intelligence for IT Operations. This system can continuously perform troubleshooting operations and fixes to the network.
- Reduced operation costs– This is achieved through transport independence across the different connection types.
How it works
Running the network is possible through four principal concepts in sd-wan.
- The concept of what traffic is requested. This is meant to ensure that the traffic matches the proper application.
- How requests are treated. This is where the system determines which request to accept and which one to block in preparation for the next step. Other parameters are also considered.
- Whereby– This concept determines the best path a request should follow.
- To where?– Here, a request triggers the search for a matching application so that a search is done.
One step follows another until the result is achieved within the best response time.