The big picture of SDWAN 2021
The times of technology needs for people undoubtedly has transformed, these days people, including me, expect and demand access to information instantaneously anytime, anywhere and on any device. Advancements and modern technologies, emerging new businesses, great cloud companies and have made data accessibility so feasible. It is essential for you to understand how you can access information instantaneously from anywhere on any device. If you need access to information, all these you and your device have to be connected by networks, and these networks are growing and becoming increasingly complex. Networks are nothing but the combinations of switches and routers, and there are two types of network, the LAN and the WAN, the local area network and the wide-area network. LAN connects the computers and other mobile devices inside your office, and the WAN connects your office to the others in the world.
Recently there has been a trending technology called SDWAN. The technology was already conceptualized and implemented in 2000, but it came to trends in 2014, and for the past five years, organizations have been implementing SDWAN and harvesting the benefits. SDWAN stands for software-defined WAN, and software-defined is a new concept, primarily related to infrastructure and networking.
Essentially SDWAN is a better way to build and manage long-distance networks. But why SDWAN is unique? How does it work? And what makes it better? Traditional WAN’s are made of 10s and 100s and 1000s of routers that talk to each other over long distances. There is a data plane and control plane in every router; the data plane in the router is used to hold the information sent and received while the control plane directs where the data has to go. But the control plane has to be programmed and rules have to be entered to manage the network traffic on the data plane.
Let’s take, for example, there is a retail store chain that has 500 locations and is intending to roll out a video application; let’s assume each store location has a router, of course, each router in the traditional way has to be programmed, and rules have to be set, and this rule has to be programmed on 500 routers in 500 locations, this could be a huge and complicated task. Network engineers and specialists have always found a way by developing tools and scripts to automate the changes. These tools and scripts can solve the problem; however, they also introduce new issues and complexity.
With SDWAN, the routers, control planes, and data planes can be viewed, monitored, and managed from a single window. The rules and policies can be implemented in one click by applying the rules and policies to a group of control planes or data planes. SDWAN is a software application that will be a central management portal that makes it easier to use broadband internet. Configuring new or existing networking infrastructure is much easier than the old way with fragile command lines and manual updates.
You can implement SDWAN if you are looking for agility, performance and lowering cost. SDWAN increases agility by simplifying network policy configuration and management. SDWAN provides higher performance by intelligently leveraging multipath including broadband connections, which reduce the IT operational cost.
The benefits of SDWAN are that it reduces the cost of operating the WAN by lowering the WAN traffic by leveraging low-cost internet access and direct cloud access. SDWAN improves performance by configuring, prioritizing and steering business-critical traffic to the most efficient route. The right SDWAN solution can provide integrated security features like NGFW, IPS, Encryption, AV and sandboxing capabilities that can help prevent data loss, downtime, regulatory violations, and legal liabilities. Well, they say LAN connects the computers inside the office, and the WAN connects your computers to the outside world, SDWAN is the modern technology that allows organizations to monitor and manages WAN seamlessly.
