A massive change in the way that businesses access applications has come about because of  the cloud and this has caused a considerable shift in the way that technology is deployed.

Cloud computing’s business model (a provision as-a-service) has changed the way users pay for their IT infrastructure and how they think about the applications their company uses to provide services to customers.

Despite the bold statements you read in the press, there is no “stampede into the cloud” especially by mature businesses, but rather a more measured, business-focused approach with deployments happening where the cloud model can be proven reliable, secure and cost-effective.

The result is that many organizations are now running complex networks consisting of private data center(s), cloud platforms of various types, and edge deployments in branch offices or remote locations. This is the hybrid topology (of which one also reads a lot).

Traditional technologies used to connect these disparate elements don’t provide the network agility, reliability and performance required to take advantage of public cloud offerings like AWS, for instance.

The ease with which compute, storage, and support services can be brought online is in contrast with the intricacies of managing the interconnections that bring such services into the fold of the enterprise’s larger WAN.

That was, until 2014, when VeloCloud, now part of VMware launched their software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) service which aimed to automate and abstract away from IT departments the configuration of complex devices in branches, and the manual configuration of each device to create a wide area network.

Source: VeloCloud

VMWare SD-WAN technology provides the platform on which organizations can build their WAN securely, at scale, and quickly, to ensure the reliability and performance that organizations need as they move their applications to the cloud.

VeloCloud does this by creating a virtual WAN overlay on the physical network that is managed by a central Orchestrator.

After VeloCloud’s acquisition by a company with more than a little history in virtualization itself, VMware now offers an SD-WAN solution that leads the way in terms of technological prowess, but more importantly, in its focus on using business policy to drive network behavior.

What underpins the solution are the concepts of SDN which are about enabling flexible, automated, secure, and scalable interconnections from branch offices to the enterprise applications, whether they are in the corporate data center or in the cloud.

Applications in the data center, in any number of cloud installations or in the branch office, can be connected and managed, with traffic prioritized according to policies set by the businesses and implemented by their IT staff. Changes can be fully-automated, and services in remote offices can be provisioned or discontinued with a single click of the mouse.

The platform solves real-world complexities experienced by IT departments every day – such as the issues often met when attempting to bring up remote locations rapidly, migrate business-critical applications to the cloud or improve visibility & control of the entire corporate network.

The platform also solves routing and performance issues. Whereas previously, networks were configured to haul data back to the data center over expensive private links from the edge, today’s cloud-oriented network schemas need a solution where the edge connection takes the most direct route to the cloud.

Source: VeloCloud

The VeloCloud platform bonds multiple links of any type and directs traffic over the best available link to ensure high performance. The VeloCloud Gateways break out traffic for the cloud from traffic for the data center and ensure that it is delivered directly.

To ensure data security the VeloCloud platform can be used to automate the configuration of virtual network segments (with overlapping IP address pools, if required) suitable for discrete use by groups within the organization. The VeloCloud Orchestrator is multi-tenant and multi-user, making the VeloCloud solution suitable for customers in the ISP/MSP space.

With network segmentation and multi-tenancy, sharing networks and platforms safely is a matter of configuration, rather than a potential security worry.

For instance, client-facing and employee-facing apps can be hosted on shared facilities, as can, for instance, PCI-compliant and non-compliant data. The ability to create an architecture based on least-privilege from the central Orchestrator means new rollouts can be designed to comply with data privacy regulations, as necessary, and a new branch office’s network can be integrated into the whole with ease.

Your organization may be considering moving more services and apps into the cloud, or might just be looking for a responsive and secure way to manage a complex WAN. With VMware SD-WAN, your network becomes a powerful, automated, high performing and reliable environment in which to do business today and in the future.

To speak to the software-defined WAN company, click here to get in touch with a local representative from VMware.