One of the significant challenges faced by businesses in their digital journey is the lack of a robust networking solution. Companies are migrating to the clouds in droves and finding themselves trying to work with and around their legacy systems, and that comes with serious challenges.

Organizations are still deploying conventional network architectures which are not capable of meeting the workload of digitally driven, cloud-based operations. Interconnecting multi-cloud-based applications & services significantly increases network usage, which affects the overall performance of the business, and by proxy, affects its customers’ experience.

However, fortunately, there is a solution that businesses can acquire to overcome their latency issues and allow the technical intricacies required to manage complex networks to be managed by powerful software. It is called software-defined WAN or SD-WAN, and it’s quickly gaining traction among business leaders everywhere.

According to one estimate by IDC, the SD-WAN market is expected to hit US$4.5 billion in value by 2022, and is expected to grow at a rate of 40.4 percent CAGR.

“Incumbent networking vendors have quickly realigned their routing and WAN optimization portfolios to take on the growing cadre of startups in this market. Enabled by a rapid uptake across the service provider domain, SD-WAN infrastructure continues to proliferate in the coming years, providing a beachhead for other software-defined networking and security functions in the enterprise branch.”

The immense growth of SD-WAN is a natural progression of the technology that connects organizations’ different resources to one another, to their cloud suppliers, and to customers, suppliers and partners. Some of the important benefits include:

• Improved business agility and scalability – SD-WAN transfers the nimble and agile properties of cloud computing to enterprise networks. This allows IT teams to deploy and scale solutions dynamically, on-demand. For instance, if a business is expanding with two extra branches, an IT team could grant access to the widely-distributed WAN for all the new employees within minutes. Furthermore, SD-WAN allows for additional customizations and security configuration, optimized performance and protection on a per user, or per site basis.
• Increased cost efficiency and savings – Companies that deploy SD-WAN have the option of subscribing to a more cost-efficient carrier network to convert its own connections to that of the higher performance enterprise data carrier. Meanwhile, companies that already have MPLS networks could deploy both MPLS and broadband to enable automated, hybrid WAN to attain enterprise-grade failover at a reduced cost, and more importantly, much reduced complexity of management and switchover.
• Optimized cloud architecture – On top of enabling seamless access to the cloud and SaaS-based applications, SD-WAN enables companies to optimize their bandwidth usage fully, by using context-based routing. As Organizations become increasingly dependent on the public internet to access cloud-based applications, SD-WAN helps companies to prioritize mission-critical traffic by creating smart traffic routing. This maintains enhanced application performance, even if the connection is often
• Enhanced oversight and security – Perhaps the most meaningful yet background benefit that SD-WAN delivers is a secure network with all network traffic internalized in a closed loop, even if the business has offices and facilities on the other side of the world. It allows enables security policies and measures to be applied across the entire network, and thus minimizing potential attack surface for bad actors. Moreover, SD-WAN provides complete infrastructure visibility, for optimal resource allocation and a viable, measurable network for future expansion plans.

SD-WAN technology will, without a doubt, revolutionize your business network and boost your digital transformation agenda. But with so many solution providers in the market today, which one do you pick? Tech Wire Asia picked top three SD-WAN providers that businesses should consider to reinvent network capability.

INFOVISTA

Founded in 1997, Infovista could be considered a seasoned player in the tech industry and its Ipanema SD-WAN solution stands out in several aspects. By deploying what it terms Application Intelligence+, Infovista promises an unprecedented level of application performance optimization to transform an unpredictable network into a fully-enhanced, user-focused service.

Unlike other solutions in the market, Ipanema uses true end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) metrics independent of the underlying network to ensure optimal performance for every user on the network, regardless of the location or time of day. It achieves this via a set of microservices that combines the unique values of deep packet inspection (DPI), dynamic bandwidth optimization, dynamic class-based queueing & prioritization, and intelligent path selection based on real-time user experience quality metrics.

Businesses have the option to deploy Ipanema using physical appliances, or by virtual network functions (VNF). With your company’s digital transformation initiative entirely dependent on the strength and efficiency of your network, you need a complete WAN solution that provides necessary control, for all users at all locations, and Ipanema’s highly granular session-based traffic management helps you achieve just that.

More information about Infovista’s Ipanema SD-WAN that ensures application user experience under every workload circumstance and network architecture can be found here.

VELOCLOUD

As the innovator and pioneer of virtualization technology, VMware’s impact on the world of technology is immense and belongs among the elite group of companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft.

When the company acquired VeloCloud last year, it just seemed like a natural progression that the company extend its software abstraction capabilities, already widely provisioned in data centers around the world, to enterprise WAN.

VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud aims to simplify deployment of the technology while securely supporting application growth, boosting network agility and enabling branch access to cloud bases’ applications and services, thanks to centralized deployment capabilities. IT teams automate configurations using a simple graphical interface, without needing to be physically present at a branch.

Virtual WAN layers can be deployed within minutes by plugging in and authenticating. VMware SD-WAN Edge hardware allows the network to be configured automatically based on preset business rules.

VeloCloud, which first hit the proverbial shelf in 2014 continues to set the benchmark for all other SD-WAN providers while being part of the long list of solutions from VMware that boost organizations’ digital journeys.

VIPTELA

 Cisco is a household name when it comes to network hardware and its equipment is already a standard feature in most data centers. This puts the company in a good position when it comes to integrating its software solutions to infrastructure that includes WAN.

Cisco SD-WAN, powered by Viptela, promises predictable application experience and increased user productivity through an optimized cloud and on-premise application performance control with real-time analytics, comprehensive visibility and unprecedented levels of detailed management.