What is SD-WAN   These days people expect access to information anytime, anywhere & from any device. Cloud computing & mobile devices have helped to make this possible but, the networks that keep everything connected keep growing & are becoming more & more complicated, especially to manage.   There are two types of primary networks, a local area network (LAN for short) & a wide area network called a WAN.   A LAN network connects all the devices inside your office together while the WANs connect your office to other offices & remote sites that could be anywhere in the world. A new technology is being adopted by many companies currently called SD-WAN which is the next generation of WANs.   The SD in SD-WAN stands for Software Defined which uses software to make the configuration of WANs work smarter, Faster & at a lower cost. Essentially, SD-WAN is a better way to build & manage long distance networks.   Why? How does it work?   A traditional WAN is made of tens, hundreds or even thousands of routers that talk to each other over long distances.   Within each router there is a data plane & a control plane. The data plane contains the data being sent or received while the control plane controls where that data should go.   The control plane of each router needs to be programed by someone with a set of rules that govern how to handle the traffic from the data plane. This is usually done by entering a set of commands into a command line interface known as a CLI by a network administrator which can be a manual, time consuming & an error prone process.   Take a large retail store chain with 500+ branches around the world that needs to deploy a new application. Each location may have a router on site that needs 10 commands entered for the correct handling of the video application. Thats 10 commands x 500 sites which is 5000 commands. If each command takes 30 seconds to configure, that adds up to over 41 hours, not to mention the planning time for each site.   This is a very cumbersome & error prone process, imagine making a mistake in one of those commands & having to hunt down root cause of the error or troubleshoot the application. Personnel & IT resources would be severely impacted.    With SD-WAN this whole process is greatly simplified. For starters, parts of the control plane are centralised, that way changes to the control plane can be grouped, simultaneously & easily managed across the entire WAN using business defined rules & most importantly from a central management tool.   This added simplicity makes it easy to take advantage of broadband internet connections instead of relying on expensive private circuits. Business critical applications can be given a secure & higher priority link between locations that is controlled & defined within the central management tool while other applications that might be taking productivity away from employees like social media can be given a lower priority or even blocked altogether with a rule again deployed from the central management tool to all sites in seconds.   Key SD-WAN Advantages   Increases agility by simplifying network policy configuration & deployment times Provides higher performance by intelligently leveraging multiple paths including broadband connections Together these lower IT operational costs   ... View more