SD WAN and Cloud for the New Age Hybrid Enterprise

As enterprises embark on the Cloud journey, hybrid technology environment is becoming the new normal. Enterprises need the flexibility and scalability of public Cloud services as much as the imperative to protect and extend the capabilities of traditional infrastructure within premises. The external technology environment is becoming supportive with the maturity of enabling technologies that marry these two environments.

Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) is quickly gaining adoption and becoming the de-facto technology to facilitate enterprise readiness to embrace Cloud services. SD-WAN embodies Cloud-like capabilities, steering enterprise course towards Cloud.

A closer examination of the disruptive capabilities of both technologies show how digital transformation is becoming easier.

Automation and increased efficiency

Increased automation is a hallmark and key benefit in Cloud deployments reducing downtime, eliminating margin for error and improving productivity and efficiency. Automated Cloud environments enable enterprises to provision and deploy infrastructure, scale up and down without manual intervention.

SD-WAN brings automation in managing and expanding enterprise networks—branch offices, data centers, cloud-based workloads including SaaS  to deliver a seamless network. You can provision branch offices faster with automated deployment, simplified configuration and monitor it remotely on a single pane from centralized location.

Availability and Awareness

Applications and infrastructure in the Cloud are available at the click of a button without the long-drawn process of requisition and procurement in the traditional environment. Cloud workloads can be deployed to be always available and highly performant using best practices such as building redundancy, self-healing architectures and fail-over strategies.

Similarly, SD-WAN comes with built-in awareness that can assess in real-time which application to prioritize for optimized user experience. It is equipped to handle large volumes of traffic with bandwidth optimization technologies and ensure applications are available at all times.

Security and Visibility

Security by Design has become an inherent building block while deploying Cloud workloads and enterprises have achieved high levels of security by incorporating security in every layer of deployment—what kind of architecture; which services to provision at which layers; how to interconnect services; allowing permissions; provisioning alerts and alarms; accessing and transporting data securely; encrypting data at rest;  back-up and fail-over strategies; governance structures that not only automate monitoring but also prevents attacks.

SD-WAN has built-in security capabilities that ensure enterprise networks are always protected from attacks—within enterprise and from outside. With built-in encryption and firewalls, SD-WAN facilitates integration of enterprise networks with Cloud services ensuring security at the perimeter and into the Cloud.

The Future has Arrived

Technology evolution is rapidly advancing, facilitating digital transformation of enterprises. Embarking on this journey is inevitable and no longer a question of if but when. Enterprise digital transformation has arrived.