Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 29 | Page 65

FINAL WORD The most critical step in choosing the right solution for any given enterprise is understanding at a high level how they want to manage their SD-WAN. Today there is certainly no shortage of challenges for businesses managing and adapting their enterprise networks. Given Digital Transformation drivers including IoT, mobile networks, remote workforces and cloud, networks must be more intelligent and adaptive then ever – able to support new use cases, access types and topologies without sacrificing performance, security or latency – all while enabling the teams managing them to keep their costs low. In this world, SD-WAN is increasingly becoming the networking solution of choice for modern enterprises – so much so that IDC predicts that the market for SD-WAN will reach US$5.25 billion by 2023 in their 2019 SD-WAN Infrastructure Forecast. At its simplest, SD-WAN is a softwarebased solution that simplifies management of a business’s WAN to optimise performance and flexibility while keeping operational costs low. The main drivers for SD-WAN adoption include: 1) giving a CIO more control and insight over his WAN network, 2) increasing the agility of the WAN network, 3) ensuring the WAN network evolves with changes in traffic topology, including increased traffic flowing to SaaS cloud via the public Internet and 4) being able to scale bandwidth costeffectively, especially in areas with limited competition among incumbent network service providers. In contrast to traditional networking, the customer is able to monitor their network deployment, near real-time performance, configuration, congestion, traffic-steering policies, applications involved and more through their SD-WAN. It addresses common pain points for modern business networks, including quality of service and security and meets requirements of today’s decentralised, geographically spread, cloudcentric networks. It is critical for key decision-makers in the business to understand the exact requirements of the organisation and to choose, deploy and correctly use the most appropriate SD-WAN service. Choosing the right SD-WAN solution for your business The most critical step in choosing the right solution for any given enterprise is understanding at a high level how they want to manage their SD-WAN. What kind of support is needed from the supplier, given the IT resources available within the business? For certain very large corporations, a ‘DIY’ approach to deploying and managing an SD-WAN solution may be considered. The DIY model involves businesses buying SD-WAN technology directly from the vendor and deploying and managing their SD-WAN solution in-house, giving them full control and visibility of the network. However, building a complete SD-WAN architecture across multiple locations and network access types with multiple vendors is a complex task and it is essential that a business adopting this approach have an IT department with the required skills and experience to design and manage their SD- WAN solution internally – including dealing with potentially tens of different local loop INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS Issue 29 65