Before jumping in to understand SDWAN, we need to understand what is a WAN. The acronym stands for Wide Area Network which basically means your big cloud which connects all your offices together so they can talk to each other. If you only have two offices, for example, you can imagine it like a pipe connecting your two offices together. Usually this WAN service is paid service just like how you get your Internet services. With SDWAN which stands for Software Defined WAN is like a smart WAN, if I could say that. It is a technology that is capable of using any Internet services (DSL, fibre, 4G, etc) to provide you similar result what WAN was offering. So you could use for example, one Internet using fibre service and the other using DSL. However, its not only that. You can use different combination of these Internet services together to provide more resiliency to the WAN connection. By resiliency, we mean, your WAN connection will be more powerful and less prone to connection problems simply because it will not be relying on just one service.Just using the last example, if your Fibre Internet had issues, you still have connection to your other offices via the DSL Internet. With having this option of using different services concurrently, you can also control your traffic flow how it traverses from one office to other. For eg you may want business critical traffic over fibre so it is fast and less important traffic over DSL. Finally, the best part is, you can have the combination using existing WAN services as well. For eg, Fibre Internet and your existing WAN. Usually this is the recommended practice as most of the times a customer will typically have a dedicated WAN service already in place; he can simply add an Internet service and use SDWAN over them. For SDWAN between all your offices, you will need to ensure all the offices have SDWAN compliant devices to support this technology.
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