The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated
digital transformation initiatives to offer an improved customer experience and
personalised services, all while tackling increasingly sophisticated
cybersecurity threats. More than ever, organisations need flexibility to keep
pace with business change, but they are often hindered by a sluggish and rigid
network infrastructure.
Jacob
Chacko, Regional Director – Middle East, Saudi & South Africa at Aruba (a
Hewlett Packard Enterprise company) describes the five key benefits of
implementing an advanced SD-WAN solution and how it can accelerate business
growth:
1. Improve business agility while
reducing overall WAN cost
To
connect branch offices to the corporate data centre, organisations have
traditionally used expensive MPLS lines. As more bandwidth is required to
support increasing connectivity demands, MPLS lines become cost-prohibitive,
preventing organisations from fully satisfying their business needs. New MPLS
circuits can take up to four months to be provisioned, greatly slowing down the
ability to spin up a new branch. This hinders business changes, agility, and
flexibility.
“An SD-WAN leverages less
expensive internet and 5G connections by virtualising and bonding network
links, creating secure tunnels from the branch offices to the data centre and
to the cloud. With SD-WAN, organisations can realise the agility needed by the
business while reducing costs,” says Warren Gordon,
ARUBA/HPE Business Unit Manager at Duxbury Networking, local distributors of
ARUBA/HPE technology.
2.
Increase
security and seamlessly transition to a SASE architecture
Organisations with an MPLS
router-based architecture are not able to easily enforce security policies in
branches due to the rigidity and the complexity of their network, especially in
hybrid-cloud environments. The security perimeter is dissolving as users and
devices now connect from anywhere.
Traditional
security measures such as VPNs are limited as a VPN doesn’t support enforcement
of granular security policies. Indeed, once a user has been identified and
authenticated with a VPN connection, they can access critical resources inside
the network even if they shouldn’t.
SD-WAN is the foundational component
to implement a robust SASE architecture. By choosing best-of-breed security
capabilities with a tight SD-WAN integration, organisations ensure maximum protection
to their employees and other stakeholders accessing the network.
3.
Enable
a cloud architecture
Organisations are migrating their
applications to the cloud and use software as a service (SaaS) cloud-hosted
business applications such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox,
ServiceNow and many more instead of hosting them in the data centre. However,
organisations with traditional router-based WAN architectures continue to
backhaul cloud-destined traffic from branch locations to the data centre, mainly
for security reasons, severely impacting the performance of cloud applications
at the branch.
SD-WAN enables organisations to
embrace the flexibility of a cloud architecture while improving cloud
application performance by steering traffic directly to the cloud using local
internet breakout.
4. Simplify WAN
infrastructure
Over the years, organisations have
built their network infrastructure as their business grows. Branch offices
often ended up with a stack of appliances in their facilities including
routers, firewalls, VPN concentrators, and WAN optimisation devices. Updating a
business or security policy such as moving an application to the cloud or
improving quality of service often requires manually reconfiguring multiple
devices. Not only does equipment sprawl require advanced networking skills to
maintain and manage, but it also results in multiple maintenance contracts to
administer.
SD-WAN enables organisations to move to a thin-branch model by reducing the amount of equipment in branch locations streamlining the network architecture and significantly reducing WAN management overhead.
5.
Centrally
manage network operations and get visibility
Very often, organisations must manage
their network operations on a local basis resulting in a lack of flexibility.
The network deployment of new remote sites can be tedious and can take several
weeks to accomplish. Corporate IT departments often don’t have complete network
visibility to comprehensively monitor transport throughput, packet loss, latency,
and jitter. An advanced SD-WAN continuously monitors network health and
automatically adapts to changing conditions to always deliver optimal
application performance.
With SD-WAN, new branch offices are
set up quickly and easily, and security policy changes can be automatically
distributed to hundreds or thousands of branches in minutes while minimising
errors. Network administrators can monitor network health through a single pane
of glass and dashboards.