In a recent Forbes article written by Michael Xie, President and CTO of Fortinet, Xie takes us through a scenario to help us understand SD-WAN. In Xie's words:  

"Consider the 2020 Tesla Roadster. The all-electric supercar has a 620-mile range, can go from zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds, with a top speed of over 250 miles per hour. Except, of course, at Centinela Avenue in Los Angeles, approaching the 405 freeway at rush hour.

There, the Roadster’s top speed might be just 11 mph — just like every other car in one of the most congested traffic corridors in the country. Crawling alongside a humble Nissan Versa for example, the Tesla — for all its revolutionary technology and extraordinary design — returns the same basic level of performance. Despite the innovation, insight, expertise and cost contained within the Tesla, it is still subject to the performance limitations of the conditions in which it operates. And those conditions can limit it dramatically.

The same is true of digital networks, particularly at the enterprise level."

This is a powerful analogy Xie explains as every organization tries to build a fully meshed network even at the edge. Even if you are implementing the best cloud technologies and removing on-prem hardware, you still need to consider your connections and how they are prioritized.

This is where SD-WAN can help.  SD-WAN allows you as an organization to define and enforce security protocols as well as prioritize traffic heading to your WAN. Additionally, if done correctly, SD-WAN can help your organization cut significant cost out of your traditional MPLS bills that require increases in bandwidth to achieve the performance you desire.

If you have an SD-WAN project coming up, or you want to start thinking about it for your organization, here are a few factors to consider:

1. Your current bandwidth requirements - With SD-WAN, you may not need to purchase higher bandwidth to achieve better performance. You should determine the true bandwidth needs per location and go from there.
   
   For example, an edge site with five users connecting to cloud/hosted applications likely will not need more bandwidth, just better routing of the existing traffic.
   
2. Security - What do you currently do for security at your locations? How are your firewalls configured? With SD-WAN, data can be encrypted from point to point to allow for a greater security stance if desired. However, if you have confidence in the current security posture, you can make no security changes and simply add SD-WAN for routing efficiencies.
   
3. Spend / Budget - Do you have budget constraints? One of the most common comments we hear in IT is “our budget goes down or stays the same, yet expectations grow with the demand for data.” If this is a challenge you are facing and you have not considered SD-WAN, this should be a project you move to the top of your list.
4. WAN Stability - If you are a global business, what is an acceptable response time? SD-WAN’s success is correlated from the design of the WAN and how traffic is being routed from Point A to B. If data is transferred across the world, is the latency caused by the traffic on the WAN or is it the local site for lack of bandwidth?

The above bullets are just a few factors to consider, however it’s clear SD-WAN deployments are helping organizations across the globe reduce cost and improve user performance.  If you are considering SD-WAN or any of these challenges apply to you, talk to Opkalla today.