Digital Transformation is widely embraced by the corporations today across the globe in some form or the other. But, there are still a few enterprises that just don’t acknowledge the potential of a strong underlying WAN connectivity. Poor WAN connectivity can entirely derail your digital transformation process. On the other hand, well-designed SD-WAN can take your digital transformation journey to a whole new level.
Today, IoT, cloud, big data analytics, AI and such technology stacks play a vital role in digital transformation. But a top-notch fundamental WAN architecture is often overlooked.
Let’s see how SD-WAN can greatly help in your digital transformation journey:
Everything you need to know about SD-WAN and Digital Transformation:
It is a known fact that digital transformation is rapidly evolving across organizations, but it is also true that most of the legacy WAN architectures are not being able to cope up with these latest technologies. This only slows down the whole process for companies, limiting their potential to explore digital strategies and cloud.
Corporations are inclining towards cloud-based services as they are more cost-effective, flexible, secure and scalable. It considerably reduces the need to opt for legacy architecture that is comparatively also very expensive. By switching the workloads to cloud platforms, enterprises are able to deploy and deliver applications faster, whilst providing exceptional security and reliability.
Getting a reliable, modern WAN is essential so as to reap maximum benefits when you move your application workloads to cloud. Otherwise, the digital transformation would be lacking.
SD-WAN (Software-defined Wide Area Network) is an optimal solution, as it provides full control and enhanced visibility into users as well as applications throughout the network. Plus, it also provides exceptional customer experience and operational efficiency.
SD-WAN is a well-curated, high-level software-defined networking application that runs over WAN connections. It is a virtual network that can be deployed over your existing infrastructure. Look for an SD-WAN solution that offers edge device functionality including DHCP, firewall, NAT (network address translation), service chaining and ability to integrate third-party apps. It should allow users to seamlessly and securely access the applications from anywhere, whilst providing exceptional UX.
How SD-WAN solidifies your Digital Transformation Strategies?
SD-WAN is a modern framework developed to target digital transformation strategies along with other business-critical problems. It is an ideal solution that centralizes your underlying network infrastructure for easier management. With this approach, SD-WAN can build up secure tunnels and set up dynamic paths as per the nature of the network. This reduces the manual tasks of setting up tunnels and also provides better overall visibility.
With SD-WAN, you can define traffic policies and SLAs to be applied across the entire network through a centralized control. This not only simplifies your operational complexity but also enhances traffic movement.
We all know cloud applications or SaaS prefers to run with low latency. And, SD-WAN is able to directly send traffic from the branch to the internet, without passing it through the longer route of data centers. This provides exceptional user experience for multi-cloud applications. Since the branch is accessible to the internet, SD-WAN also comprise top-notch security/compliance aspects to protect your IT integrity.
SD-WAN provides a variety of choices to safeguard your entire network. With cloud security solutions, you can define and re-route traffic to these security cloud providers before it is actually exposed to the internet-based cloud applications. Even the SD-WAN routers owned by the cloud providers are further secured with IDS/IPS, advanced malware protection, firewalls, URL-filtering and so on.
In short, SD-WAN can not only accelerate deployment and delivery of critical applications, but also segment confidential data into secure tunnels and make a low latency path for traffic.
Use Cases of SD-WAN:
1. Automate data traffic via policies:
SD-WAN solution allows you to control and manage network traffic with various security and performance requirements based on the users, applications and location.
SD-WAN has a well-integrated, centralized GUI-based control that allows you to set up traffic path policies as per the business requirements. This is much better than the traditional approach of setting up individual WAN devices via a command line interface.
Businesses will be able to only allow traffic of specific users through secure connections, or send unified communications traffic towards high-capacity SD-WAN devices and so on. Every time you update or configure a new policy, the same will be reflected across all managed devices.
2. Connecting remote sites directly to the Internet based apps
Most of the enterprises today are employing cloud-based applications. Traditional connectivity methods slow down the process of connecting branches/remote sites, especially due to inefficiency and errors.
SD-WAN greatly simplifies and speeds up the whole process. It lets you build up a shadow appliance on the central console and then simply make use of zero-touch deployment function to bring the SD-WAN devices at the branches online.
3. Set up one-to-many connections of SaaS application to remote sites
Internet-based SaaS or cloud applications are used by several people, from different locations. SD-WAN solution provides a well-configured central console and automation features to provide a seamless experience to these users.
It can establish secure connections to interconnect businesses’ remote sites, cloud regions and their VPCs.
4. Establish temporary VPN connection for DevOps
Enterprises cannot afford waiting weeks and months to get a VPN connection to the cloud in order to employ DevOps practices. They need to securely and quickly connect the users to cloud-based apps via SD-WAN. SD-WAN is able to set up VPN connections to the cloud within minutes to employ DevOps practices.
5. Branch multi-cloud access
Users are able to connect to cloud applications from any location with enhanced visibility.
6. Secure DIA
Direct Internet Access (DIA) allows branch workers to directly access the internet from the branch locally, thus offloading communication traffic through the WAN and boosting internet performance.
7. Optimization of Application Performance
With SD-WAN, you can design a global, secure network where your business-critical applications always keep pace with the highest SLAs and consistently deliver best performance.
Primary Benefits of SD-WAN:
Below given are some of the significant benefits of SD-WAN which can empower every corporation’s digital transformation strategies:
Wrap Up:
It’s a given that corporations across the globe transform digitally, and there’s no end to it. You must keep pace with the competition and consistently design new, secure, scalable and flexibility infrastructure to solidify your business objectives.
For this, know that your digital transformation strategies require solid SD-WAN connectivity that can meet the ever-evolving needs of businesses. A well-designed SD-WAN infrastructure will allow you to deploy big data applications efficiently and faster. And, companies with a strong, well-built SD-WAN infrastructure definitely have an upper hand!