What Is SD-WAN & How Does an SD-WAN Works

What is SD-WAN - SD-WAN is a software area wide-area network architecture that allows organizations to modernize their traditional WAN networks to meet the growing needs of digital evolution. With SD-WAN solutions, organizations obtain high-performance network resources that support digital transformation (DX) initiatives to simplify operations and improve business agility.

SD-WAN solutions transform an organization's resources, leveraging enterprise WAN, as well as multi-cloud connectivity, to provide high-speed application throughput at the edge of WAN branches. SD-WAN provides a centralized control mechanism that can determine and direct the optimal route for traffic (MPLS, 3G / 4G or broadband), ensuring that your organization can quickly and easily access business-critical cloud applications.

Traditional architectures consisted of a WAN concentrator and a radio architecture based on slow and expensive MPLS connectivity, which offered a below-average user experience, especially for cloud-based applications. For a user to access a website, traffic must first pass through the WAN, a security stack, and finally, the forms. In a world where most users expect the same broadband connectivity at home, this type of legacy WAN architecture does not add up.

The evolution beyond this type of traditional WAN architecture with SD-WAN allows organizations to overcome the archaic services of MPLS and open their networks to access the Internet directly. SD-WAN solutions not only enable organizations to reap the benefits of software applications as a service (SaaS), public cloud applications and unified communications but ultimately offer a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

How SD-WAN Works

An SD-WAN solution connects users with any application anywhere, from the data center to the cloud. SD-WAN intelligently determines the path that best meets the optimal performance needs for a specific use. It then directs traffic to the ideal WAN route, while traditional WAN architectures can route all applications through MPLS. These are some characteristics that define the operation of an SD-WAN solution and its evolution from a WAN infrastructure:

Knowledge Of Applications

With traditional WAN solutions, organizations experience less than optimal quality and find it challenging to provide high-performance bandwidth for mission-critical applications. Since legacy WAN architectures rely on packet routing, they lack in-depth application visibility. However, SD-WAN solutions intelligently identify forms in the first packet of data traffic. Network teams get the visibility they need on the most used applications in the organization, helping them make smarter and better-informed decisions and policies.