FINAL WORD
Software defined networking can ease WAN pain points
Is connecting a branch office to your enterprise wide area network timeconsuming and often disruptive to your organisation ’ s operations ? If you answered yes , you are not alone .
Branch office connectivity has long posed a challenge for geographically distributed organisations , a challenge that grows as organisations enter new markets or expand within existing ones . Essentially , configuring or even changing wide area network infrastructure at branch offices can prove a nightmare given the distributed nature of the beast and the remote touch points involved . Attempts at delivering the lean branch office have sometimes resorted to public cloud services that may fail to meet IT requirements for control , security and more .
Software defined wide area networking SD-WAN , however , can present a technology paradigm for wide area networking that delivers easy-to-deploy , inexpensive connectivity to branch offices , while ensuring high performance and quality levels . Wide area networking issues are hard to address because of the distributed nature of the resources , but certain SD-WAN solutions can enable automation and orchestration from a centralised location .
With SD-WAN IT organisations can dramatically simplify the management , configuration and maintenance of wide area networks with greater ease , efficiency and effectiveness . Secure paths are created across multiple wide area network locations with zero-touch provisioning . Bandwidth can be virtually allocated and network traffic controlled from a single , centralised location .
Bhaskar Peruri is Regional Manager of Middle East at Silver Peak
This solution fits in perfectly with enterprises of varying sizes , locations and vertical markets , and tackles common pain points including high cost of wide area network connectivity caused by wide area network transport , equipment and personnel expenses , slow provisioning of network resources and traffic congestion , hassle of complex devices and hardware updates , difficulty in adapting or scaling to changing business requirements and inadequate level of network performance for emerging cloud computing
But in order to be effective , a largescale SD-WAN rollout requires a rapid installation process for individual offices , particularly when dealing with branch offices without dedicated IT staff .
Essential requirements for SD-WANs include granular visibility into both legacy and cloud applications , as well as centrally assigned business intent policies to secure and control all wide area network traffic . To be implemented at scale , these capabilities must be easily distributed from headquarters to branch offices .
Ideally , the SD-WAN solution should allow for flexible orchestration to ensure rapid branch rollouts . As part of the configuration , administrators can map local traffic classes into deployment profiles . These policies can then be folded into discretely managed virtual topologies and using the key tenets of software-defined networking and virtualisation , these virtual overlays can ensure proper end-to-end handling of wide area network traffic according to defined business intent . For instance :
• All voice traffic stays within its own overlay , uses its own traffic tunnels , is arranged into a full mesh as all sites need to talk to each other , uses multiple connection types and requires maximum quality .
• All enterprise data is also segregated and uses a dual hub and spoke topology with datacentres as the hubs . It also uses multiple connection types and requires maximum availability .
• Guest WiFi only connects the sites that offer it . A simple Internet connection gets you by and the main requirement as it is not business-critical , is that the cost is kept low .
Granular security can be assured though a capability known as micro-segmentation , where individual workloads are mapped to underlying resources , and security controls are applied accordingly . By mapping global business policies into local office profiles , your organisation can ensures a highly visible and tightly controlled high-performance enterprise wide area network .
62 Issue 02 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS