How SD-WAN is Impacting Global Enterprises’ WAN Strategies | Industry

on Monday, October 1, 2018 at 12:34:46 am

By Rami Rammaha, Director of Product Marketing at Silver Peak

1. Ensuring resiliency and business continuity 24/7 of network and applications
2. Enforcing granular security policies to applications and users
3. Achieving superior application and WAN performance

More interestingly is that the survey revealed how SD-WAN is impacting broader WAN functions including routers, security and WAN optimization. The following chart summarizes the impact:

• 69 percent intend to replace their existing branch routers with SD-WAN
• 67 percent want integrated WAN optimization with SD-WAN
• 62 percent plan to replace dedicated branch security appliances with cloud-based and SD-WAN

Click here to view the survey infographic.

Let’s look at how Silver Peak® Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN addresses these WAN functions:

1. Routing – While routers are no longer necessary with advanced SD-WAN solutions, “routing” is. As enterprises move away from traditional routers, they are seeking a simple way to migrate without network forklift upgrades, retaining the ability to connect to branch offices still using routers. The survey results indicated that the retail segment has a higher preference to replace branch routers. The lightboard video below illustrates how to migrate from traditional routers to SD-WAN.

2. WAN Optimization – The traditional WAN optimization deployment model was to deploy a dedicated appliance at each site requiring optimization. But with the emergence of SD-WAN architectures, enterprises prefer an edge platform that unifies WAN optimization over deploying dedicated appliances. Silver Peak uniquely offers this capability with Unity Boost™, an optional WAN optimization performance pack. 80 percent of the technology sector surveyed prefers a unified solution, and global IT decision makers ranked integrated WAN optimization functionality #3 in their SD-WAN selection criteria. The lightboard video below illustrates how enterprises can easily support on-demand WAN optimization with the EdgeConnect platform.

3. Security – As applications become more distributed across locations spanning cloud providers and on-premise data centers, the traditional security model where a dedicated firewall at every branch or backhauling all traffic to the data center for centralized inspection may no longer be needed. Survey respondents indicated the need for having the flexibility to direct traffic for inspection based on application type, organization size and compliance mandates. The lightboard video below illustrates the ability to automatically steer applications traffic to a security appliance or cloud security service based on centrally defined business and security policies. Silver Peak First-packet iQ application identification and classification capabilities enable secure local internet breakout.

to learn how SD-WAN is helping enterprises achieve superior application performance.

(This article first appeared here.)