Network Communications News (NCN) June 2017 | Page 27

BUSINESS AGILITY
business practices. It needs to
be more than an incremental
approach of replacing manual
processes with automated ones,
and should take the form of a
holistic solution that supports
business aligned orchestration
and management of the network.
This is where SD-WAN can be
of help, as it enables organisations
to make on-the-fly adjustments
to network performance and
application delivery from a
centralised location, and therefore
meets businesses’ ever changing
needs. Ultimately, this translates
into reduced costs and operational
complexity, as well as increased
optimisation to deliver superior
performing applications and
experiences to users.
Ease + automation = agility
To put it simply, SD-WAN allows
businesses to streamline and
simplify how hybrid networks are
deployed and managed, enabling
organisations to provide fast and
secure delivery of applications
hosted on-premises or in the
public cloud with greater agility
and ease.
SD-WAN enables organisations
to direct traffic and deploy network
services from a centralised location
— all with just a few clicks. This
means typically manual tasks, such
as configuration and provisioning,
can then be automated. What’s
more, an App-centric SD-WAN
will automatically identify the
applications in the organisation’s
network and group them into logical
categories based on business
criticality, and apply network
service policies to those categories
based on built-in best practices.
These benefits offer
organisations a broad range
of possibilities. They can
automatically route voice traffic
to their highest quality network
paths; segregate employee
traffic from that of partners and
customers; and send recreational
Internet traffic through the most
rigorous firewalls.
SD-WAN can offer
organisations a much more
holistic approach that makes
orchestrating enterprise and cloud
connectivity easier and more cost
effective, which is why the SD-
WAN market is expected to grow
significantly in the next several
‘Organisations
can only
implement
digital
technologies
successfully
if their
network is
flexible and
agile.’
years. According to Gartner, by
the end of 2019, 30 per cent of
enterprises will use SD-WAN
products in all their branch offices,
up from less than one per cent at
the end of 2015.
In today’s cloud-centric
world where business velocity
is increasing, agility is the key
to success. But organisations
will struggle to achieve it as long
as their networks remain stuck
in traditional hardware based
frameworks. This calls for a
fundamental rethink of networking.
True agility is about the
ability to deploy and manage
network services, applications,
monitoring capabilities, and edge
IT as intuitively as downloading
applications onto a smartphone
and as instantly as spinning up
compute and storage resources
into a public cloud. New
technologies enable organisations
to increase connection speeds,
improve application performance,
and reduce data traffic – in turn
allowing them to meet business
needs efficiently and effectively.
For further information visit:
www.riverbed.com
June 2017 | 27