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20 Dec 2020

Why you are underutilizing your SDWAN, and what to do about it

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Ranit Fink
underutilizing SDWAN
Table of Contents

SDWAN (Software Defined Wide Area Network) is no longer the new kid on the block. It’s been around for several years, proving to be a solid, albeit not perfect, alternative to MPLS where it is deemed too expensive or complex to utilize the gold-standard solution. Since they were first introduced in 2014, SDWAN solutions have been rapidly evolving, with new features released on a regular basis. While these features can significantly improve enterprise connectivity, often customers are not utilizing them.

The main reasons don’t necessarily have to do with the quality of the features, but rather the effort it takes to utilize them and the learning curve associated with it. As these features are not inherent to the solution, they often require lengthy configuration. A couple of examples include application aware routing, data analytics and cloud optimization.

Why you’re not using the application aware routing capabilities of your SD-WAN

When it comes to application-aware routing, SD-WAN solution require organizations to pre-define which applications should be prioritized and their traffic accelerated. The SD-WAN provider sets the categories, and the customer required to do the configuration based on these categories. It takes time and effort to define these policies, and many times, Admins prefer to avoid it. Moreover, to strengthen their reason why not using this feature, some IT Admins argue that since this feature performs layer 7 traffic inspection, it might introduce some level of performance overhead.

SD-WAN vendors at large, handle only last-mile performance optimization. Since the last mile is only a short section of the entire path, any feature that can improve performance makes an impact. WAN-as-a-Service solutions (like Teridion’s) can control and prioritize the traffic in the middle mile, which will have a higher impact on performance than fixing issues in the last mile. Traffic prioritization by type (e.g., UDP vs. TCP traffic) can help achieve the optimal result. Check your WAN-as-a-Service solution to ensure you are not required to invest time in configuration, but that the system does this automatically

Why you are not using your network data analytics feature of your SD-WAN

Data analytics is a feature designed to give users the ability to troubleshoot network performance issues and perform long range network capacity planning on their own. However, since SD-WAN solutions do not provide a full network visibility, the effectiveness of this feature is not clear.

As a comparison, in a WAN-as-a-Service solution The service auto-scales as the demand increases and optimizes the performance automatically once it senses degradation. If the system identifies issues that are outside of the scope of the service, it sends the appropriate notification to the customer, directing him how to resolve them (e.g., contact its ISP).

Why you are not using the optimized cloud connectivity feature of your SD-WAN

SD-WAN solutions do not generally support the critical capability of optimizing to cloud connectivity: the ability to connect branch office traffic directly to the cloud, rather than back to the data center, as well as the capability to measure the performance of SaaS applications or IaaS services.

As more resources move to the cloud, this capability is even more critical. Organizations are increasingly required to build management and policy-based governance across their multi-cloud environments so they can simply and securely innovate, deploy, and manage applications at an accelerated rate. Even those SD-WAN solutions that accelerate to clouds, work only on 1-2 clouds, which for many use cases is not enough. If your SD-WAN solution offers this option, you will need to specifically indicate that this is a feature you want. A WAN-as-a-Service solution that is built on a multi-cloud network can bring you all the benefits of the cloud as a default and accelerate your cloud-based apps.

Originally enterprises used SD-WAN to simplify the management and operations of WAN by decoupling the networking hardware from the control mechanism. Another reason for the wide adoption of SD-WAN was the need to replace expensive MPLS solutions. In reality, SD-WAN did not replace but complement MPLS and now handles mainly the performance of the last mile, without offering SLAs that match MPLS performance. Furthermore, as more features are added to the SD-WAN solution, the more complex it becomes to manage it.

A WAN-as-a-Service solution simplifies the management of the network, as well the initial configuration. The multi-cloud network means you pay for what you need, and the built-in features means you are utilizing the value adding features as a default.

We believe that the main trend driving the use of SD-WAN technologies is the growing use of cloud-based applications that need access from the edge. Customers are looking for technologies to tie the data center with cloud resources. In addition, the past year heightened the need to create the fluidity of data sources between the on-premise and public cloud. The aforementioned challenges around multi-cloud environments will continue to grow.

The ultimate WAN-as-a-Service solution

Teridion is a WAN-as-a-Service solution that offers optimized cloud connectivity, data analytics, and application-aware routing capabilities built into the service, allowing its customer to enjoy them without special configuration or the need to learn a new feature.

Application-aware routing

Teridion accelerates the entire end-to-end traffic, including the middle mile, which is the long haul and where most of the value in acceleration resides. There is no cap on the bandwidth, and the network capacity is adapted dynamically in real time, filtering out application have less impact. Any indication that Internet traffic will have similar performance traveling on the regular internet, this traffic breaks out and does not traverse the Teridion network, saving the user costs.

Data Analytics

Teridion has thousands of agents globally, monitoring the traffic in segments, and analyzing the performance and availability of the first mile, last mile, and middle mile. When our system identifies as issue that is outside the scope of our network, the system notifies users on the root cause and directs them on how to resolve the network.

Optimized cloud connectivity

Teridion is a multi-cloud-based solution. The entire network infrastructure leverage over 25 cloud providers, with 500 Point of Presence spread worldwide. As a result, acceleration to SaaS and IaaS are provided inherently in the solution from day one. Customers using Teridion services, are accelerated to any SaaS application or Cloud workload they use. We are also proud to say that our end users are seeing 40% performance improvement of applications like O365, and in China 200% improvement of enterprise application

By providing them this capability as a service, via the Teridion network, we simplify the work of the IT manager. Allowing him to take the toll of planning and setting up its network, and offload this work to us

 

Teridion guarantees superior, reliable performance. Contact us to learn more.

Picture of Ranit Fink
Ranit Fink

VP Product and Business Development

Ranit Fink is the Vice President of Product and Business Development for Teridion. Prior to Teridion she was the co-founder and VP business development of Cellrox, a mobile security company. Ranit holds an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Columbia University and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Bar Ilan University.
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