Today, more and more companies are adopting a digital transformation strategy to improve their performance and agility.
This transformation involves migrating their applications, infrastructure and work processes to the cloud in order to benefit from the advantages offered by cloud services such as scalability, flexibility and reduced operating costs.
In addition, this migration to the cloud entails a significant transfer of resources from data centers to the cloud, thus allowing companies to quickly adapt to changes in their market and reduce their infrastructure costs.
However, this migration to the cloud also poses challenges in terms of security, connectivity and performance management. Companies must ensure that sensitive applications and data are protected while guaranteeing reliable connectivity and adequate quality of service for remote users.
SD-WAN solutions can help businesses meet these challenges by providing secure, high-performance connectivity to cloud applications while reducing infrastructure costs. Let’s find out more about SD-WAN and its benefits in this article.
What is SD-WAN?
THE SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) is a technology that allows to manage WAN (Wide Area Network) connections in a centralized and automated way. It aims to provide more efficient, but also more economical access to cloud services, data centers or applications, for example. It replaces traditional WAN routers to ensure dynamic traffic distribution.
An SD-WAN system is typically made up of different elements that work together to provide secure, high-performance connectivity to remote users, such as the following:
- Border equipment : These are SD-WAN gateways that are installed at remote sites to connect users to centralized applications. These devices can be physical or virtual and can use different connection technologies such as MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), the Internet or VPNs (Virtual Private Network)
- SD-WAN controllers : These are the centralized management elements that are used to configure, manage, and monitor SD-WAN gateways. Controllers can be installed on premise or in the cloud.
- Security tools : Security devices, such as virtual firewalls, VPNs, and intrusion detection and prevention tools, are integrated with SD-WAN edge devices to protect users and data from malicious attacks.
- performance management tools : Performance management tools, such as monitoring and diagnostic tools, allow you to monitor connection performance and detect connectivity issues so you can fix them quickly.
- Security and quality of service policies : These define the routing rules and security levels for different applications and users.
- Analysis tools : They provide insight into users, applications, performance, and threats to make informed decisions about SD-WAN configuration and management.
Why are enterprises increasingly interested in SD-WAN?
With the evolution of technologies, companies are increasingly faced with increased connectivity needs for their mobile employees and the increasing use of services clouds.
While older networks focused on linking physical locations, they are no longer sufficient to meet today’s needs. Companies that continue to use this old approach to meet new needs therefore find themselves faced with expensive global connectivity, complex and irregular topologies, and disparate products that are difficult to maintain and secure.
SD-WAN provides a solution to improve connectivity, reduce costs and strengthen security to meet today’s business needs, which makes it more and more popular among enterprises.
Since SD-WAN allows enterprises to manage and configure their WAN networks, this means that it allows users to connect to applications securely and efficiently, including using dynamic routing methods to optimize performance.
By using SD-WAN, enterprises can improve their agility by building more flexible networks and reducing deployment times. It also provides cost savings by using cheaper Internet connections for high-speed data communications and reducing operating costs.
SD-WAN also improves security by using encryption mechanisms to protect data in transit and by using virtual firewalls to protect users and applications from malicious attacks. It can also be used to improve the quality of service of applications by using dynamic routing methods to avoid congestion and packet loss.
All its advantages, and more, support the idea that companies increasingly need SD-WAN for their local operations, but also for their strategy of expansion and international development.
