Intelligent CXO Issue 16 | Page 14

TECH TRENDS

SD-WAN trends in the post-COVID era

5As governments begin lifting restrictions , the COVID-19 crisis has had a profound

impact on organisations . Jacob Chacko , Regional Director – Middle East , Saudi & South Africa at Aruba , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company , speaks to Intelligent CXO about five key trends in SD-WAN that organisations need to follow to rebound from the pandemic .

As governments begin lifting restrictions , the COVID-19 crisis has had a profound impact on organisations . Many organisations have run out of business , some have survived , while others have thrived . This last category was perhaps the best prepared because they had already digitised a large part of their operations , if not their key business functions . As organisations emerge from the crisis , they now must reinvent themselves , be more resilient and increase their ability to cope with business change . In this article , we ’ ll take a closer look at the key trends in SD-WAN that organisations need to follow to rebound from the crisis and get ready for the post-COVID era .

1 . Digitisation and cloud migration are now a given
The crisis has accelerated Digital Transformation and the move of applications to the cloud . As a result , the role of the data centre is shrinking and it has become less relevant to backhaul the traffic to the data centre . Organisations now need flexible wide area networking connections that allow them to securely steer the cloud-hosted application traffic directly to the cloud . Continuing to backhaul cloud traffic using costly , rigid MPLS lines prevents them from optimising and modernising their network based on business needs . of experience at the same level – and even better – than the previous WAN model based on backhaul . Advanced SD-WANs intelligently steer the traffic to the Internet and also use SaaS optimisation techniques , leveraging Machine Learning to automatically select the best path to reach applications . Organisations can also seek greater flexibility by implementing a Network-asa-Service model with SD-WAN as a foundational building block .
2 . The move to hybrid or multicloud is accelerating
The migration to hybrid cloud ( a composition of a public cloud and a private environment ) and multicloud is not new but it continues to accelerate . This means there is an increasing need to simplify the process of orchestrating network traffic not only from the data centre to the cloud , but also from one cloud provider to another . Additionally , organisations are developing cloudnative applications based on microservices , APIs and a multi-cloud approach . These applications use a scalable architecture that helps support a greater business adaptability .
With this shift , organisations need enhanced connectivity to cloud providers to run applications hosted in multiple clouds .
An SD-WAN allows IT departments to modernise the network to embrace Digital Transformation and increase the alignment of IT systems with business objectives . SD-WAN connections can indeed leverage cheaper and flexible Internet and 5G / LTE connections and deliver end-user quality
Advanced SD-WAN solutions can be seamlessly deployed to cloud service providers providing secure end-to-end connectivity to the cloud . With these solutions , organisations can easily move workloads from one cloud provider to another , for example from AWS to Azure .
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