“SD-WAN adoption is ramping up globally, but MPLS still remains the dominant networking technology,” TeleGeography senior manager Greg Bryan recently told Network World. “It’s interesting to note that DIA market share is larger than SD-WAN.” While MPLS and private line aren’t about to disappear, Bryan expects the “vast majority of multinational enterprises are going to adopt SD-WAN over the coming years.” Among mid-sized firms, Techaisle researchers expect SMB adoption of SD-WAN to grow by as much as 145 percent. Techaisle found a high awareness of SD-WAN among U.S. SMBs and an understanding of the importance of proactive network management and network performance. The top motivators for SD-WAN consideration among SMBs surveyed by Techaisle are improving network and application performance, enabling network resiliency and failover, better management of application data traffic, and consistent security and connectivity across locations. The large opportunity notwithstanding, SD-WAN has become a bit of a bucket term, entailing much more than one option for the customer. Like most new or emerging platforms, SD-WAN is a technology, not a solution or service. Different types of solutions are built using the technology, and pitching the wrong type of SD-WAN solution to the right customer is a waste of everyone’s time. So, at the risk of over simplifying, generalizing and missing important exceptions, here’s a breakdown of the three types of SD-WAN architectures widely available to adopters and partners, including a profile of the ideal customers for each. SD-WAN DIY The first type of architecture is where SD-WAN started and is the simplest of the three formations. It’s generally referred to as either “edgebased” or “CPE-based” SD-WAN, and it consists of SD-WAN appliances located at two or more customer locations that talk to each other and measure latency, congestion, etc. The appliances can sit behind routers or replace them and can collapse other services in the typical branch stack by replacing appliances for WAN optimization and firewalls. This type of SD-WAN is a relatively simple, affordable, quick and flexible way to gain insight and optimization of traffic over a pair of MPLS, private line or internet links while also providing automatic failover. The boxes are touted as plug-and-play and connections as secure. But that’s only between the boxes and their respective locations. Edge-based SD-WANs rely on two devices talking to each other to measure and shape the network traffic between them. There is no service provider POP or gateway to the “cloud” in this scenario, just the links between locations, so the abilities to do dynamic path selection don’t extend out to cloud and SaaS-based services. While it can provide better and speedier access to cloud and SaaS tools, quality of service and traffic shaping can be controlled only at the edge. This premises-based SD-WAN is most attractive to organizations with a DIY spirit that run a lot of in-house applications and operations housed in data centers, rather than a cloudcentric architecture. One common small configuration includes bonding an MPLS link for voice, video/virtual desktop with an SD-WAN-controlled internet link for everything else. Again, this is a relatively affordable, simple, flexible way to “digitally transform” an existing private network. (Editor’s note: We soon could see an edge-based SD-WAN solution that has the unique ability to take round trip measurements to optimize SaaSbased applications.) Through the Gateway For the second SD-WAN architecture we’ll discuss, which generally is described as a “gateway-based” or “orchestrator” SD-WAN, a provider’s gateway device acts as that second device that the edge-based device talks to in order to measure packet loss, jitter, latency and congestion over a bonded pair of two or more circuits. This introduces an orchestration layer between the CPE hardware and the network to create a true softwaredefined or virtual network. It provides all the same functions as an edgebased SD-WAN plus the additional benefits of a cloud infrastructure. These cloud gateways can be thought of as large, multitenant SD-WAN devices deployed into top-tier data centers across the globe. “Instead of just QoS at the edge for SaaS apps, companies can now leverage gateways to optimize the majority of the route to the applications they’re accessing,” posted Sarah Arnstein, sales engineer at Avant Communications. “In fact, these gateways are Spending in IT, Complexity Continues to Rise gy Group Source: Carmel Group Source: Altman Solon survey for Masergy, February 2021 Reasons for Adopting SD-WAN SD-WAN Adoption Driver Share of Respondents Current Adopters, N-245 more transparency in their contact center sure Disagree Strongly Disagree better agent coaching mprove agent performance programs mprove their ability to engage with customers em assign agents to the right tasks ing down overall operating costs mprove their products or services em make strategic business decisions SD-WAN adoption today vs. in 5 years Source: Altman Solon survey for Masergy, February 2021 50% More complex than two years ago More efficient to deploy & manage Lower cost Quicker to deploy new locations or alter existing Ability to consolidate network onto one environment Ability to accommodate bandwidth variation More compatible with cloud requirements Improves network performance Enables orchestration across multiple types of access -79% of enterprises today have adopted SD-WAN to some extent In 5 years, -92 of ente adopt SD-WAN and 38% it at all loc Today 21% 54% 16% 10% 8% 25% 28% In 5 Years In general, how complex is your organizations’s IT environment relative to two years ago? (Percent of repondents, N-500) ? 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021E 2022E 2023E 2024E 38% 38% 34% 24% 22% 19% 18% 17% No SD-WAN Some SD-WAN Mostly SD-WAN Fully SD-WAN No SD-WAN Some SD-WAN Most SD-W VIRTUAL REALITIES 24 CHANNELV ISION | JULY - AUGUST 2022
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