Don’t believe the hype. In response to rapid growth in data traffic, increasing reliance on cloud applications, and the shift to a distributed workforce, as well as the increasing complexity and risk of enterprise networks, SD-WAN continues to rapidly evolve across industries and integrate new technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation.
In essence, SD-WAN is and will continue to be the foundation of the enterprise networking and security stack. It is a key component in the convergence with advanced security, as advocated by SASE, which integrates managed cloud security into a comprehensive network security offering.
To understand we need to look back at the last five years or so, and start focusing not on the buzzwords, but on business priorities and what SD-WAN actually does — along with the impact of the pandemic. Companies with distributed businesses had been investing in distributed infrastructures to support their future for some time before the pandemic hit. Covid-19 has contributed by creating an unprecedented reliance on the business network, primarily as a means of business continuity and uptime, but also as the infrastructure on which an entirely new hybrid operating model now relies.
Transitioning from Legacy Networks
Global organic food company Darling Ingredients, after bolivia mobile database deploying SD-WAN before the pandemic as part of a plan to migrate all of its sites from legacy Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks, quickly ramped up its SD-WAN usage and deployment in the nine months after the pandemic forced shutdowns across major countries.
By moving to SD-WAN, the company says it was able to get more bandwidth at a lower cost because it was no longer tied to MPLS providers and their pricing. This essentially gave it the freedom to shop around and find whoever could offer the best bandwidth at the most attractive price. The second major benefit was that with SD-WAN, Darling was able to route all Microsoft Office 365 traffic to the infrastructure provider’s network rather than the Internet. This allowed for a more predictable user experience when it came to the voice and video applications that the business relied on.
Growing global cloud adoption has been a boon for SD-WAN, which was already growing in demand before March 2020 as more enterprises sought to accelerate connectivity and improve network resiliency, which has become even more important. Fast forward to 2024, and the key drivers for global SD-WAN investment include the need to optimize network connections to cloud applications and improve overall security. And SD-WAN hasn’t stood still in the years since the pandemic.
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