CIOs and IT executives continue to face the challenge of reducing IT expenditures, optimizing operational expenditures, while improving service agility, delivering and maintaining excellent service quality.
Companies are always looking for innovative solutions to achieve these business goals. While the industry continues to innovate, plans such as "as a service" solutions and WAN redesign through SD-WAN have also attracted attention.
In addition to being considered cost-saving measures, these trends have another thing in common: their impact on enterprise network architecture and the trend of using the Internet as the backbone of enterprise communications.
Internet transmission: a prerequisite for cloud computing.
When companies adopt SaaS services or deploy applications on IaaS platforms, they will inevitably subscribe to an Internet-based service delivery model. Services are no longer delivered through a secure, highly available MPLS
WAN, but through a best-effort network. The Internet quickly became the basic transmission of enterprise-level traffic. Unlike traditional WAN networks, the high costs of branch offices and data centers stem from obtaining carrier-grade MPLS access. Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) or broadband Internet has ubiquitous availability and is an alternative and attractive option.
SD-WAN promotes the Internet-centric WAN in
its simplest form. SD-WAN is a technology that can flexibly select the best access transmission by dynamically controlling the traffic on multiple links. SD-WAN enables enterprises to choose between using MPLS network, Internet or LTE network based on the algorithm calculation of network performance and application behavior. The algorithm calculations for these optimal paths are proprietary and unique to each SD-WAN vendor. Enterprises now have the versatility of using multiple links and can keep operating costs low by using Internet circuits instead of MPLS links. The overall advantage of SD-WAN includes not only the hard costs associated with infrastructure, but also the soft benefits associated with centralized management and operational agility.
Although cost savings and flexibility are indeed attractive, companies need to be aware of the performance impact of using different types of circuits. Application performance and end user experience are closely related to network behavior.
Migrating to an Internet-driven architecture and adopting SD-WAN technology is a difficult task. By supplementing the existing WAN with Internet circuits, the migration process is systematically simplified to familiarize yourself with the challenges and complexity. Regardless of the path chosen by SD-WAN, it is important to have end-to-end visibility of the underlying network and application overlays.
The above is an introduction to the best practices of Internet-based SD-WAN.
VeCloud is a technological innovation enterprise that provides cloud exchange network services for enterprises as its core business. It has 30 data center nodes around the world, more than 200 POP nodes, and serves more than 300 major customers, involving finance, Internet, games, AI, Education, manufacturing, multinational companies and other industries. http://www.vecloud.com