SD-WAN Heads Home Before the pandemic struck, software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) was arguably the hottest technology in networking. Adoption was robust, as the technology had past its “peak of expectations” on the Gartner networking hype cycle and was rapidly climbing to its “plateau of productivity.” Then suddenly, when home-based workers were geographically separated from centralized work resources, enterprises looking to connect those remote employees fell back to the more familiar virtual private networks (VPNS) that SD-WAN in many cases had been replacing. VPN sales returned with a vengeance. According to a recent survey by Cybersecurity Insiders, more than seven in 10 organizations said they had increased their VPN capacity in response to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the initial rush to go remote, SD-WAN still was positioned as a solution for the branch office and was seen as less cost-effective for individual workers in their homes. But as SD-WAN vendors tweak their offerings, and the cost of onpremises devices come down, an increasingly strong case can be made for utilizing SD-WAN to connect the “branch of one” remote worker. Certainly, the benefits SD-WAN-tothe-home provide network administrators are interesting enough. SDWAN clearly is more flexible, more controllable, and provides a better user experience for today’s workers who must securely access not only internal assets but approved cloud-based resources, as well. As technology analyst John Fruehe describes things, VPNs create a type of session-based tunnel into IT resources. The user initiates a connection that punches in behind the firewall and then disconnects when done. SD-WAN, meanwhile, effectively creates a new network edge that’s always connected and granted access to everything that’s available to workers at the office. For network administrators and IT departments, specifically, SD-WANs provide a level of conBy Martin Vilaboy Network technology becomes a possible solution in ‘branch of one’ deployments 12 THE CHANNEL MANAGER’S PLAYBOOK
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTg4Njc=