In 2015, Gartner predicted that by the end of 2019 30% of enterprises will deploy SD-WAN technology in their branches. Today Gartner forecasts expect a 57% annual growth in SD-WAN spending through 2020, and, at the same time, a 23.2% decline in router spending. The SD-WAN market is rapidly becoming increasingly crowded, but no single vendor has emerged that can deliver on all functional and operational aspects that a client may require.
An effective SD-WAN strategy can deliver:
- Increased resiliency and improved fail-over solutions by aggregating multiple circuits.
- Better bandwidth aggregation and throughput through the use multiple active circuits (instead of primary/fail-over)
- Or improve performance by automatically sending traffic down the circuit that is performing the best at any given time, and/or re-routing around circuit outages or degradation.
- End to end compression, optimization, and prioritization – even over public internet circuits.
- The ability to buy more total bandwidth at a lower cost than your current spend.
- Standardization and simplification of edge technology at branch locations.
- Increased visibility and control of WAN bandwidth management and troubleshooting.
Deploying SD-WAN technology simplifies the management and operation of a WAN by decoupling the networking hard
ware from its control mechanism. This allows organizations to build higher performance WANs using multiple large low cost internet circuits, thus enabling firms to partially or wholly replace more expensive private WAN connection technologies such as MPLS.
If you are re-negotiating an MPLS or Internet contract and not looking at SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) technologies you may miss out on the most exciting technology since MPLS replaced Frame Relay, or Metro Ethernet replaced OPT-E-MAN. When considering replacement of your current WAN, MPLS, MAN, or Internet solution contact us for an independent, vendor neutral best practice recommendations. We can also assist in helping you source the most efficient and cost-effective strategy for these network services, without being influenced by which solution pays us the highest commissions as we don’t sell the services and don’t take commissions. Our network team can assist in identifying the optimized solution for your firm.
