In my previous article, I have discussed some of the facts that you need to know about Cloud Computing. In this article, I want to talk about what you need to know about the use of SD-WAN. Follow me as we are going to be looking at that in this article.
SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide Area Network. It leverages corporate web and multi-cloud connectivity to deliver high-speed application performance. In the past, organisations managed their applications on their own without the use of cloud infrastructure. They have to manage the infrastructure and pay experts to manage it. Although it’s expensive, it gives them a competitive advantage over others.
One of the challenges they have is how to make these services available to many geographical locations or LANs. The issue is now how to connect multiple LANs together. Organisations always connected their LANs using a single dedicated service provider. Although this is expensive, the service providers are about to secure the networks and make the services available.
The method of using a Service provider comes with its own limitations.
- Single Point of Connectivity is subject to outages. They are unreliable.
- There are high latency and congestions due to many applications that are stored in the cloud.
Because of this, organisations started seeking for multiple providers or cost-effective means of hosting their applications.
The use of multiple cloud providers and to solve the problem of latency, there was the development of the first generation of SD-WAN. The business now added dedicated links and deploy load balancing in order to host their applications. Although this method solves the load balancing and latency problem it becomes difficult for IT Professionals to manage it because the products and services are from different vendors.
SD-WAN issues
The problems of Load Balancing and Latency that SD-WAN solved made many organisations go for it. However, it still has some security issues which create concerns for businesses. Even after SD-WAN adoption, business still sends their data to data centres for security purpose. Some also install Firewall solutions to inspect their direct internet access. This added another product for security, which makes the network more complex and very challenging to manage.
Businesses needed to address this together by integrating SD-WAN functions and security together in one application. This enables businesses to replace their multiple appliances with a single network security solution. This ultimately reduces cost and ease of management. This allows businesses to use cloud applications more affordably. This also increases application performance and increase user experience.
Security SD-WAN
This solution also ensures that the best WAN Link available are chosen for network transmission. Also, a good SD-WAN should be able to move transmission to a better link if a particular link being used degrades. Insecure SD-WAN, your intuitive business workflows allow you to manage business applications in order to derive optimum performance.
This allows you to prioritise business application in order to get a business result. You can give priority to voice over data applications. The Secure SD-WAN is also designed in such a way that you can manage the application from a console and you only need minimal IT Staff to do that. It also has comprehensive analytics and utilization reports, It can also show you the security landscape so that you will know where the threats are coming from.
Fortigate…
This also helps the Administrator to redesign policies based on historical statistics. The overall outcomes of SD-WAN are simplification, consolidation, and cost reduction. It provides much-needed application performance, the best user experience for the enterprise. It also has unified communication as a service as well as one-time analytics for better decision making. Fortinet introduced the term Secured SD-WAN and Fortigate is at the forefront of providing this solution.
Action Point
PS: If you would like to have an online course on any of the courses that you found on this blog, I will be glad to do that on an individual and corporate level, I will be very glad to do that I have trained several individuals and groups and they are doing well in their various fields of endeavour. Some of those that I have trained includes staffs of Dangote Refinery, FCMB, Zenith Bank, New Horizons Nigeria among others. Please come on Whatsapp and let’s talk about your training. You can reach me on Whatsapp HERE. Please note that I will be using Microsoft Team to facilitate the training.
I know you might agree with some of the points that I have raised in this article. You might not agree with some of the issues raised. Let me know your views about the topic discussed. We will appreciate it if you can drop your comment. Thanks in anticipation.
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Paxitel Pty Ltd is a Professional Business Telecom service provider to the mid-market, enterprise, and NFP space. Teams Direct Routing, Contact Centre solutions, Inbound toll-free numbers, PBX and UC solutions, network services, and cloud services. www. paxitel.com