Technology

SD-WAN: Networking for a cloud economy

Enterprises have long sought a better way to link headquarters and branch offices – one that is more cost-effective and enables the more efficient management of these various links, be they data, voice or video.

14 April 2021

This is what has brought software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WANs) to the fore, as these use software to control the connectivity, management and services between datacentres, branch offices, cloud instances and software as a service (SaaS) applications.The question organisations of all sizes should be asking, suggests Den Sullivan, MD of Networking for Emerging Markets at Citrix, should not be ‘is SD-WAN right for me?’ Instead, he says, it should be ‘why have I not yet implemented it?’

“Citrix has already provided comprehen-sive SD-WAN solutions connecting thousands of branches and ATMs to some of the largest banks on the continent. If huge financial ser-vices organisations are comfortable using the technology, surely the business case is already proven,” he says. SD-WAN’s driving principle is to simplify things, explains Sullivan, and it does so by allowing routing changes to be made at the software level, instead of having to be made directly at the router. This not only reduc-es hardware costs and increases speed, it also allows for much more flexibility and control.From a networking point of view, there are definitely a number of advantages offered by SD-WAN. In the past, the need for networking specifically designed for the organisation – usually cumbersome and costly MPLS networks – severely constrained the business.

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