How SD-WAN Assures Uptime While Easing Complexity?

For a global business company, it is a necessity to have an efficient wide area network (WAN) at the workplace. The reason why WANs are very popular is because of their use as an important business tool. WANs make it possible for large organizations to undertake internal communication at a faster rate and with greater efficiency. It also allows customers to enjoy numerous benefits from organizations, which was not possible earlier.

Despite the numerous advantages of the WAN, there are certain aspects in which WAN is handicapped. Given the permissive environment of the WAN connections, anyone can send files without assurances of security on the receiving end. Also, the traditional WAN infrastructures are more expensive because of their dependence on the MPLS network connections. One of the barriers in adopting WAN based internet, is the concern regarding the availability and guarantee of a high performing network.

An appropriate SD-WAN infrastructure has several products that are designed especially for the purpose of providing a secure WAN architecture to business organizations worldwide. A resilient SD-WAN infrastructure has several virtual or physical appliances. Each device is programmed in a way that allows it to send traffic after considering the feedback received from the other side of the network. From the connectivity aspect, all of the endpoints have two or more connections that leverage a combination of an MPLS network and internet links.

In order to have a centrally managed SD-WAN infrastructure, organizations should choose a deploy-a-network approach rather than a deploy-a-node strategy for simplifying and scaling a SD-WAN infrastructure. A robust SD-WAN infrastructure helps to balance the traffic for performance and availability across all pathways and also helps in rapid and efficient deployment, monitoring and reporting of data. Such a SD-WAN system allows for the successful traffic transmission in case of critical applications.

An appropriate SD-WAN infrastructure would be able to track information related to the latency, jitters and loss of information that is to be transferred over the network. After having monitored the information, SD-WAN is able to deliver two different capabilities for maintaining the application availability and performance. These capabilities are intelligent load balancing and failover without any interruption in the session. By appropriate leveraging of the techniques, the SD-WAN infrastructure is able to deliver the best possible performance within an increase in the WAN uptime.

The two techniques delivered by SD-WAN are:

Intelligent load balancing

Load balancing refers to the spreading of the traffic in an attempt to allow customers to have improved performance across networks. SD-WAN allows us to spread a single session into many different links to enhance performance. SD-WAN is able to adapt to the changing conditions and move the information off specific links when the quality degrades or the link has failed to work. The intelligent load balancing allows the users to use all of the available bandwidth, thus reducing the congestion in the network and improving the performance of the applications that are being used. This is done regardless of the type of underlying links or the application mix. It also makes sure that applications that are quality sensitive remain on high-quality pathways and bulk transfers are completed faster by using the appropriate link capacity without affecting the traffic that is of a higher priority.

Failover without session interruption

There might be many cases when the primary link fails to work appropriately. In such cases, it becomes necessary to have a backup link that can be used for failing over. With appropriate SD-WAN infrastructure, one is able to detect the failure of a link in seconds and subsequently, traffic is moved to the remaining live links, without affecting the performance of the active sessions. The appliances are programmed in such a way that it does not require a complete failure of the link to move to another link. Even if the remaining links do not have the necessary bandwidth, traffic is prioritized and cached according to the company policies and prioritization, such that mission-critical applications continue to function despite the problems.

 The initial phase of SD-WAN implementation focused on lowering the costs of operations at global business organizations. Since then, SD-WAN has come a long way in providing operation advantages to the businesses that have implemented the SD-WAN infrastructure. Business entities have been able to get superior application performance and rapid deployment of the remote or the branch office websites through the use of such a network infrastructure. With the numerous improvements in the SD-WAN infrastructure, we have come to a stage wherein SD-WAN helps to ease the complexity in the uptime procedure for business organizations worldwide.