What is SD-WAN?

As cloud technologies have rapidly become the norm, SD-WAN has become a necessity for network infrastructure in business. What is SD-WAN? Why use it? Our team of consultants has put together a high level overview of what SD-WAN is, why it can help, and how to get started.

 

What Is SD-WAN?

SD-WAN stands for Software Defined – Wide Area Networking. SD-WAN products are physical appliances or virtual appliances deployed in remote and branch offices, data centers and cloud platforms; fixing many of the challenges of a Traditional WAN such as network congestion, latency, increasing Bandwidth needs, Network Management, Application awareness routing, etc.

 

Why are companies making the change?

It comes down to cost and performance. SD-WAN is able to improve the capacity, performance and measurablity of your network while providing a cost savings of about 40% on average. Some added benefits include circuit aggregation, reduction or elimination of MLPS, templatized deployments, and global management.

 

Is it time for me to switch?

Consider the statements below, if they apply to you it may be time to reach out to GroupA about your options in SD-WAN.

  • My WAN is too slow
  • MPLS is too expensive
  • Traditional WAN hardware is too expensive
  • DMVPN is unreliable
  • My users complain about application performance
  • It’s too difficult and it takes too long to add new locations
  • I don’t know what my WAN looks like

 

What does adoption look like?

Deployment of an SD-WAN system takes at most about 14 days, compared to traditional deployments taking up to 60. The core differences lie in the steps needed.

 

Traditional Deployment

  • Hardware acquired from large vendor
  • Network engineer makes their best guess on circuit bandwidth
  • Hardware shipped to the HQ
  • Hardware configured at HQ
  • Hardware or engineer sent to remote site
  • Cabled according to instructions
  • Cross your fingers

Deployment time: 14-60 days

SD-WAN Deployment

  • Hardware acquired from SD-WAN vendor
  • Network engineer makes precise decisions on circuit bandwidth using SD-WAN metrics
  • Hardware is shipped directly to remote site
  • Cabled according to instructions
  • Configuration is either pre-configured, or configured by simply connecting to the WAN and pushing down template(s)
  • Verify connectivity with SD-WAN dashboard and metrics

Deployment time:  7-14 days

 

Let’s Talk SD-WAN with GroupA

Interested in learning more? Reach out to the GroupA team to learn more about SD-WAN and how we can assist in your deployment.

Get Started

 

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