Why is the Demand for SD-WAN on the Rise?

Enterprise Networking Mag | Monday, March 29, 2021

The demand for SD-WAN is increasing because companies understand the importance of flexible, on-demand networking to meet their needs and support new business models.

FREMONT, CA : Software-defined networking, or SDN, influenced the networking landscape for about a decade. It developed a framework for on-demand infrastructure (such as OpenStack) to abstract network abilities from the underlying hardware and servers.

The SDN era has come to an end. SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking) is taking its place, allowing businesses to manage development, performance, and security better. SD-WAN enables users to encrypt traffic and distribute data flows across multiple links, laying the groundwork for the transition to a secure access service edge (SASE).

What Happened to Software-Defined Networking?

The software-defined networking era has come to an end. The growth of SD-WAN as SDN's successor has been fueled by the development of cloud infrastructure and applications. SDN's emphasis on LAN-side networking is no longer competitive in the WAN space.

Organizations are looking for three things: they increasingly depend on cloud infrastructure and connections to multiple clouds: flexibility, resilience, and manageability. SDN cannot compete with it.

The Rise of Wide Area Networking

The cloud computing trend has settled into a market controlled by a few mega cloud service providers. Virtual computing, containerized workloads, and cloud-based systems are all used by businesses to operate clouds.

However, they need a reliable and stable connection between this private infrastructure and their other on-demand infrastructure hosted in public clouds. As business models shift to cloud-first and cloud-native deployments, interconnectivity will become even more critical.

These same companies struggle to secure and maintain remote, mobile field force, and executive home office connections during the ongoing pandemic. SD-WAN makes transfers, adds, updates, and deletions easier to incorporate.

Prioritize Security with SD-WAN

According to an informal industry survey, most companies turn to SD-WAN to help secure their networks and safeguard their users wherever they connect to the Internet. SD-WAN will assist the team in securing the network in a variety of ways:

Containerization: Software can be containerized on edge devices and combined with the service provider's current security applications or firewalls for SASE solutions.

Encryption: Data can be encrypted between endpoints on the organization's network edge.

Distribution: Multiple bonded Internet connections can be used to distribute traffic, obscuring data flow and avoiding man-in-the-middle attacks.

SD-WAN offers a strong foundation on which businesses can create a SASE while preventing vendor lock-in by allowing them to select their preferred security vendor. This arrangement will also benefit telecommunication companies and service providers, as it offers more flexibility for customer security vendor requirements.