SD-WAN: An Agile Enabler
of Enterprise Movement
Towards the Cloud
By Wimpie van Rensburg, Country Manager Sub-Saharan
Africa, Riverbed Technology
G
one is the time where IT assets were limited
to a handful of data centers. Gone is the
time where users and applications were all
bound by one unified MPLS network. Today,
businesses are increasingly mixing off-premises assets to their existing IT infrastructure.
Productive users are everywhere, on-premise but also on
the road or at home. The Internet is becoming the backbone
of enterprise communications.
As enterprises are becoming more hybrid, the shape of
the network itself is dramatically changing. The underlying
networks are getting more diverse in terms of performance
and security. MPLS is now combined with the Internet using
a variety of transports from DSL to fiber and even 4G/LTE.
With HD Internet Video or Unified Communication and
Collaboration (UCC), the traffic mix and the communication
requirements are getting richer and more dynamic. The
network has never been so heterogeneous, distributed and
complex. Architectures built for the network as it was 10
years ago are rapidly losing relevance.
• Managing multiple WAN paths and distributed
local Internet breakouts is becoming crucial but lacks
efficient solutions.
• Being too static, mechanisms like QoS become a nightmare to manage.
• While network performance can be controlled and optimized on-premise, guaranteeing performance for mobile users and/or off-premise applications is extremely challenging.
• Holistic visibility on the traffic requires more instrumentation devices than ever.
• Visibility on the performance delivered by off-premise
cloud service providers is a new problem without a
practical solution.
Over the past few years, a novel architecture has emerged
to solve similar problems at the data center level: Software
Defined Networking (SDN). Today, vendors are emerging
with sol ][ۜ