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4 Common Use Cases for SD-WAN

Paul Desmond Posted On April 23, 2020
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Now that the technology has been with us for some time, interest in and adoption of software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) is heating up. It’s a good time to look at what’s driving organizations to implement SD-WAN and what type of organizations the technology is best suited for.

Profiling SD-WAN Candidates

When asked whether SD-WAN candidates fit a certain profile, Michael Lawson, General Manager for SD-WAN Solution Architecture for CenturyLink, doesn’t think so.

“SD-WAN spans customers sizes, industries, and verticals. We’re seeing traction across verticals,” he said. SD-WAN is well-suited to companies that are interested in acquiring, analyzing, and acting on data to improve business outcomes–which, again, is nearly all companies.

“It’s not a question of whether customers are leveraging that model, it’s the speed or pace at which they’re doing it,” Lawson said.

Common SD-WAN Drivers

While virtually any company is a candidate for SD-WAN, Lawson said the most common use cases fall into four categories:

  • Geographic Expansion. When a company is adding to its existing footprint, such as retail or branch locations, they should consider SD-WAN. Mergers and acquisitions also fit this category. In this case, the acquiring company can retain the existing services employed at the various sites of the acquired company, but use the SD-WAN as an overlay to bring them under the same corporate umbrella and apply uniform policies, security, and the like.
  • Optimizing Existing WAN Capacity. SD-WAN lets companies use a dual-connectivity strategy that spans public and private network services. IT teams can use public services to offload some traffic from their private network, thus reserving the private network for applications that need its specific performance characteristics.
  • Adding Resiliency to the WAN. SD-WAN enables a hybrid network environment encompassing multiple network connections to the same site in an active-active configuration. Traffic can be balanced among the services under normal circumstances, but should one connection go down, traffic can fail over to the alternative service or services.
  • Cloud Migration. SD-WAN is a good fit for what Lawson calls the “cloudification” of the enterprise, when companies move various applications to the cloud. With support for application-based routing, SD-WAN allows each app to use the most appropriate wide-area service depending on its requirements.

With so many drivers, it’s no wonder that interest in SD-WAN is strong. “In network circles, there may be no hotter topic right now than [SD-WAN],” Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research, recently wrote in Network World. “SD-WAN is definitely moving out of the early-adopter phase and into mainstream adoption.”

Recommended for you: Assessing Your Current WAN State is Key to Making Effective Changes

Read More

This article was previously published on NetworkWorld on September 17, 2019.

This blog is provided for informational purposes only and may require additional research and substantiation by the end user. In addition, the information is provided “as is” without any warranty or condition of any kind, either express or implied. Use of this information is at the end user’s own risk. CenturyLink does not warrant that the information will meet the end user’s requirements or that the implementation or usage of this information will result in the desired outcome of the end user.

 

Related posts:

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  2. How Adaptive Networking Solutions Benefit Tech Companies
  3. 8 Key Considerations When Selecting A Managed SD-WAN Service Provider
  4. Lumen Expands SD-WAN Portfolio with Industry-Leading VMware VeloCloud Solution
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Author

Paul Desmond

Paul Desmond has been involved in the IT trade press since 1988. He is principal with PDEdit (www.pdedit.com), an IT publishing firm he founded in 2001 that produces content for the IT trade press and vendor communities, including white papers, case studies, blogs and Web sites. Prior to founding PDEdit, Paul spent 11 years at Network World, serving as a reporter as well as news editor and features editor. Under his leadership, Network World's features department took home a number of editorial excellence awards, including a 1996 Neal Certificate of Merit Award from the Business Press Association and two 1998 awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. Paul has also served as editor of Redmond magazine and was the founding editor-in-chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine, which earned a Neal Award for Best Startup publication of 2005. He was also founding editor of the eComSecurity.com Web site, now known as eSecurityPlanet.com.

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