Challenges of SD-WAN Management
In my interaction with network operations teams of various enterprises who are adopting SD-WAN, there is a common consensus that though SD-WAN has advantages over an expensive MPLS network, it presents new operational challenges like integrating smoothly with their existing networking monitoring solutions. This concern is very important when you consider that contrary to marketing claims; SD-WAN is not replacing MPLS but actually presents a low cost alternative for some portion of traffic which doesn’t have a mission critical SLA requirement.
It could simply be thousands of users connecting to the corporate network from home. It might be a remote warehouse thousands of miles from headquarters requiring real-time inventory management. Or a hotel group needing to give guests Wi-Fi access in a remote island resort. Or a consumer electronics retailer needing to reliably demonstrate a store full of audio-visual devices in its stores. Make no mistake, the enterprise network now spans everything and everywhere. At the same time, every user demands a consistent, high-quality experience.
Network operations teams are running short of options to efficiently monitor edge infrastructures for broadcom. The popular software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies introduce more virtual components, making networks more complex to manage, troubleshoot, and triage. Moreover, a heavy reliance on hybrid networks creates additional blind spots that increase the risk of application and user experience disruption.
This eBook explores three reasons why native SD-WAN monitoring tools struggle to provide the visibility needed to deliver superior service levels to end-users. It also reveals how modern, multi-vendor SD-WAN monitoring provides end-to-end unified approach into the WAN virtual and physical infrastructure, including third-party networks. This unified approach enables network teams to better understand network traffic patterns, ultimately leading to improved economics and service assurance.
Enterprise Networks Are Shifting
There’s no stopping the cloud. Study after study shows that cloud services adoption is booming. More and more enterprises are turning to public cloud platforms to transform the organization and reach a future state faster, whether it is to increase agility to unlock innovation, enhance the customer experience, or reduce the cost of building new applications. SD-WAN also choosing to move their legacy applications to the cloud.
Traditional networks typically rely on multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) circuits to connect sites to data centers – it’s a classic routing technique in private telecommunications networks that directs data from one node to the next based on labels. However, the rapid adoption of cloud-based applications creates an MPLS bottleneck as network traffic is increasingly Internet-bound, rather than destined for the corporate data center.
To mitigate this problem, enterprises are now moving towards a hybrid WAN architecture, SD-WAN utilizing both MPLS and Internet-based connections, or sometimes Internet-only connections. Using this architecture, sites and users are directly connected to the Internet instead of being backhauled through data centers, whatever their location is.
Forward-thinking organizations are making the Internet their new enterprise network. It’s a strategy that lowers costs and reduces the strain on the MPLS backbone while delivering greater flexibility and scalability.
To read full download the whitepaper:
Three Reasons you need continuous, End-to-End Performance Validation For SD-WAN
