Revolutionizing Network Connectivity: Exploring the Benefits of SDWAN Technology

Enterprises today consume significantly more bandwidth as their employees stream video, download massive files, hold multi-media meetings, engage in other data-intensive activities, and use cloud-based applications. Simultaneously, these enterprises want dependable, secure, and high-performance network connections to their corporate branch offices, data centres, and public cloud applications. SD-WAN, or Software-Defined Wide Area Network, is the best solution on the market with technology that simplifies the management and optimization of enterprise networks, allowing them to connect multiple sites or remote locations and do more.

SDWAN is a Cloud-Delivered WAN that simplifies WAN connectivity and management by delivering virtualized services from the cloud to branch offices and mobile users. SDWAN particularly the Velo cloud model simplifies WAN connectivity for your enterprise, by providing complete visibility and management through one pane of glass at a lower cost with its network as a service, pay-as-you-grow model.

Our SD-WAN solution enables enterprises to utilize multiple WAN transports simultaneously and maximize the bandwidth while ensuring application performance. This requires building an overlay network, which consists of multiple tunnels, monitoring and adapting to the change in the underlying WAN transports in real time. This will deliver a resilient overlay network that considers the real-time performance of WAN links.

Some key features of our SDWAN are:

• Link aggregation: Aggregation of multiple links such as Fibre, MPLS, Broadband, 3G/4G LTE and use it as a single pipe.
• Continuous WAN Monitoring: Performs real-time link and path quality monitoring. The solution will provide in real-time, available capacity, latency, jitter, and packet loss of all paths. VeloCloud performs both active (probes) and passive (user data) monitoring.
• Dynamic Applications Steering: Performs application-aware per-packet traffic steering. This allows our solution to provide sub-second brownout and blackout protection.
• On-demand link remediation: Provides on-demand error and jitter correction, to mitigate degraded network conditions commonly seen with public Internet.
  
  And consists of several components which are:

• Edge (VCE) – a CPE device installed at branch location. This device terminates multiple WAN links which can be a combination of broadband, cellular using 3G/4G USB modem, and private WAN (future). The edge establishes connections over multiple links to a network of Gateways.

• Gateway (VCG) – scalable multi-tenant virtual appliance which terminates the connections from the Edge and provides traffic management and connectivity to the rest of the enterprise and cloud services. Edges communicate with one another and to SaaS and DC through Gateways. For connectivity to enterprise DC or head quarter where bandwidth is typically not an issue, Gateway supports standard IPsec VPN to enterprise existing data center head ends, e.g., firewall, VPN appliance, or aggregation router.

• Orchestrator (VCO) – scalable multi-tenant management platform which provides real time and historical monitoring capability, configuration, and diagnostics through a simple-to-use Web interface.

SD-WAN provides several benefits over traditional WAN technologies, including improved network performance, reduced costs, and enhanced security. Here are some of the key benefits of SD-WAN, with a particular focus on business-guest traffic segmentation:

Business-Guest Traffic Segmentation: SD-WAN segments network traffic into business-critical and guest traffic, enabling businesses to prioritize their critical applications and allocate resources accordingly. It also helps reduce security breaches and ensures the network is optimized for the business’s needs.

Control/Management: With SD-WAN, enterprises have greater control over their network infrastructure, enabling them to manage their networks more effectively. SD-WAN provides centralized control and management of network devices, which simplifies network operations and reduces the risk of errors. It also allows businesses to easily configure, monitor, and troubleshoot their networks, ensuring that they are running at optimal performance levels.

Reporting/Visibility/Monitoring: SD-WAN provides enterprises with greater visibility into their network performance, enabling them to identify and address issues more quickly. This visibility enables enterprises to make informed decisions about their network infrastructure and optimize it for their needs.

Scale and Centralized Policy Control: It allows enterprises to easily scale their network infrastructure to meet their changing needs. Deployed across multiple locations and easily managed from a centralized location. This centralized policy control ensures that network policies are consistent across all locations and enables businesses to easily make changes to their network infrastructure.

High Availability: Gives enterprises high availability and redundancy, ensuring that their networks are always up and running. This high availability ensures that businesses can continue to operate even in the face of unexpected network disruptions.

Quality of Experience and Performance Assurance: SD-WAN provides enterprises with improved quality of experience and performance assurance for their critical applications. Automatically detecting and routing traffic based on application requirements, ensuring that critical applications receive the network resources they need. This improves the performance of these applications and ensures that users have a consistent and reliable experience.

Provisioning and Ease of Deployment: This solution is easy to deploy and manage. It requires minimal hardware and can be deployed using a cloud-based or on-premise model. This ease of deployment and provisioning reduces the time and cost associated with deploying new network infrastructure, enabling businesses to quickly respond to changing business needs.

Segmentation and Integrated WIFI Capabilities: SD-WAN enables enterprises to segment their network traffic based on various criteria, including location, application, and user. Additionally, SD-WAN can integrate with WIFI technologies, enabling enterprises to provide wireless access to their network resources. This integration enhances the mobility and flexibility of the network infrastructure, enabling businesses to meet the needs of their users more effectively.

Security for Sites and Branches: SD-WAN provides enhanced security for enterprises by enabling them to implement security policies across their network infrastructure. Providing end-to-end encryption, network segmentation, and advanced threat detection and prevention capabilities. This enhanced security ensures protection of critical data and applications from potential security threats.

In conclusion, as digital transformation continues to accelerate, and the need for cloud-based applications and remote access grows, SD-WAN is becoming an essential tool for modern enterprise networking. Offering a variety of benefits over traditional WAN architectures. By providing centralized management, automation, and optimization of network traffic, SD-WAN can help businesses reduce costs, improve application performance, and enhance security. Additionally, SD-WAN enables enterprises to leverage multiple network connections, including broadband, cellular, and satellite, for increased reliability and resiliency. However, choosing the right SD-WAN solution can be a complex process, and requires careful consideration of factors such as security, scalability, and vendor support, which we at Dandemutande will help you navigate. Ultimately, enterprises that adopt SD-WAN can benefit from a more agile, flexible, and cost-effective network infrastructure that is better suited to the demands of the digital age. With the right approach to implementation and management, SD-WAN can help enterprises stay ahead of the curve and remain competitive in an ever-evolving technology landscape.