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What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN technology is a new way to manage and optimize a wide area network. It is designed to address the changing use of enterprise networks due to the growth of cloud computing and mobile devices. It is a more flexible solution than MPLS, better supports a distributed and mobile workforce and is more reliable and scalable than VPN-based WAN.
SD-WAN is implemented as a network of SD-WAN appliances connected by encrypted tunnels. Each SD-WAN appliance is connected to a set of network services (typically MPLS and some Internet services) and monitors the current availability and performance of each. Traffic reaching an SD-WAN appliance is classified based on application and prioritized using a set of centrally managed priorities before being sent out over the best available network link.
SD-WAN makes it possible to replace MPLS, which is expensive and time-consuming to connect to new locations. It also allows security functionality to be distributed to the network edge, making it unnecessary to send all traffic through the enterprise data centre for scanning before forwarding it to cloud services. With this new approach, latency and performance are no longer affected.
An SD-WAN can eliminate the need to deploy expensive point security products at branch locations by converging networking and security functionality. An SD-WAN with a large network of globally distributed points-of-presence (PoPs) can provide high-performance, secure networking with centralized management and visibility.
How does SD-WAN Work?
Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is designed to solve many of the challenges associated with traditional WAN design. SD-WAN abstracts away the details of the networking layer, allowing the WAN to use a variety of different connection types interchangeably, including LTE, MPLS, and broadband Internet. This abstraction can improve network bandwidth, performance, and redundancy and enables centralized management and orchestration.
SD-WAN works by creating a network of SD-WAN appliances connected by encrypted tunnels. Each site on the WAN has its own SD-WAN appliance, and all traffic flows through that appliance. Since all appliances are centrally managed, consistent networking policies can be enforced throughout the organization. When traffic enters an SD-WAN appliance, the appliance determines the type of application traffic and routes it to its destination based on existing policies and the availability and performance of different network links.
Traditional SD-WAN is hardly perfect. Many SD-WANs do not include integrated security, so each branch location must deploy its own standalone security products. SD-WAN also includes the deployment of an SD-WAN appliance at each endpoint, which makes it difficult or impossible to use it for cloud and mobile traffic. Finally, SD-WAN often relies upon the public Internet, which can cause reliability concerns. However, many of these problems are solved with secure access service edge (SASE) platforms
SD-WAN vs. MPLS: Its Pros and Cons
As global organizations become more common, the need to connect geographically distributed LANs via a WAN becomes extremely important. To compete effectively, organizations need access to stable, high-performance WAN at an affordable price. Three options exist for providing this: the public Internet, MPLS, and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN).
The first option for an enterprise is to route internal traffic over the public Internet. The two primary advantages of this approach are quick setup and relatively low costs since broadband Internet is widely accessible and typically affordable. However, these advantages come at the cost of unstable performance, volatile latency, and a lack of end-to-end management.
MPLS is designed to provide high-performance and reliable network connections backed by SLAs guaranteeing latency, packet delivery, and availability. However, these high-performance connections are expensive and extremely slow to deploy (taking weeks or months). MPLS connections are also ill-suited to cloud computing since traffic must be pulled back to a centralized access point before being sent out to its destination.
SD-WAN provides the best of both worlds by abstracting away the details of the network infrastructure. By choosing the optimal route from a collection of public Internet connections and MPLS links, SD-WAN can balance performance and cost on a per-application basis. Cloud-based SD-WAN provides additional benefits, including integrated security, support for mobile and cloud users, and predictable latency and packet loss.
SD-WAN vs VPN: Let’s Compare
Internet-based VPNs and cloud-based software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) are two options for an enterprise WAN, both offering much lower cost and higher flexibility than MPLS. In the SD-WAN vs VPN comparison, cost, performance, reliability, and configuration & maintenance are important factors to consider.
The costs associated with the enterprise WAN boil down to the costs associated with acquiring the necessary hardware or software and the costs of deploying, configuring, maintaining, and monitoring it. Acquiring SD-WAN hardware incurs some costs, but the costs of operating and maintaining it are relatively low. With VPN, the software can be cheap or even free, but the complexity of maintaining a VPN-based WAN can be significant.
The performance of a VPN is limited by the public Internet that it runs on, which can create significant latency for long-distance connections. A cloud-based SD-WAN running over a private backbone, on the other hand, has high performance regardless of connection distance. The reliance of VPNs upon the public Internet also hurt them in terms of reliability, where links can go down unexpectedly. An SLA-backed cloud-based SD-WAN running on Tier-1 private links has much higher reliability.
Finally, VPN-based WANs can have significant configuration and maintenance costs due to the complexity of creating different encrypted tunnels for each point-to-point connection. These connections also lack centralized visibility and monitoring, making them more complex to secure. A cloud-based SD-WAN can be easily deployed to a site and is centrally managed, minimizing configuration and maintenance costs.
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