As the digital world evolves strongly and as its cycles accelerate, companies are looking for ways to make agile and flexible business wherever they are. This requires easy and cost-effective access to enterprise applications, however, taking into account sufficient communication capacity and security.
451 research survey carried out by 53 percent of companies sees IT infrastructure modernization important to improve the capability of scaling the business, operations speed, and agility. An interesting finding is that the current closed WAN (MPLS) network is seen as the least agile IT solution in companies in the research.
As the business grows and globalizes, transforming working activities into the cloud and mobility more and more, the current WAN (MPLS) is considered to be a costly and rigid solution with its fixed connections and high costs. At the same time, the ability of the Internet network to provide an inexpensive and fast network for a company has proven to be a good solution for many needs.
The SD-WAN solution has three elements that the business needs.
- The decrease in fixed costs
- Productivity improvement and flexibility
- Simplifying WAN and management.
Building an SD-WAN service platform requires judgment and good planning. The choice of platform should be scalable, secure, support the hybrid IT (cloud and local) environment. The solution must be open, which allows the use of different access technologies and the most suitable network operators per country. Today most of the solutions available for the market are so-called Hybrid SD-WAN implementations, creating a separate management layer over the old IT infrastructure hiding its complexity. This intelligent layer allows multiple connections to be used simultaneously, with good security control, analytics, and reporting combined with a centralized control panel.
One of the well-known customer stories is Carlsberg, who implemented the SD-WAN network at 130 locations in Europe to support the company’s digital transformation, especially for transferring applications to the cloud. As a result, 70% of the traffic is over the Internet, the capacity and speed of the network are ten times, and the cost was reduced by 25% compared to the old MPLS network. Awesome results, however, the implementation of the SD-WAN solution is not “plug and play”. There is no reason to underestimate the complexity of the project and carefully design and test each area.
Hannu Rokka, Senior Advisor
5Feet Networks Oy