Smooth SD-WAN migration – this is where everyone is moving!
A Platform Tailored for Business | Article
SD-WAN is a cost-effective bespoke solution at the forefront of today’s network evolution. It allows businesses to manage the whole infrastructure from the Cloud and provides strict security to applications and services. It benefits organisations with agility and flexibility while cutting costs quite dramatically.
“Rewriting how WAN is delivered in the Cloud Era”
Why is SD-WAN a perfect solution for the Cloud?
Organisations leveraging branch office locations, IoT devices, and distributed network devices face unique considerations as they migrate to the Cloud. Many older (WAN) solutions rely on backhauling branch office traffic to the data centre, subsequently exhausting network bandwidth, which results in poor application performance. Further, these solutions are generally rigid, complex to configure, and expensive to maintain, requiring significant manual network configuration to integrate them properly with cloud environments.
It provides flexibility in network options, such as Internet Broadband, MPLS, and LTE.
Measure twice, cut once
A good design is needed to save hassle and unnecessary expenses later. The core points below provide insight on where to concentrate your efforts and what is essential.
Analyse and Understand your network and applications to get SD-WAN ready
Some may think this is elementary, but it is very important to take full advantage of SD-WAN technology. How many applications are hosted in the Cloud, and what type of applications are they? Traffic flows, latency, priorities—QoS. In a nutshell, how everything is put together and how SD-WAN will segregate those services connecting to the Cloud and Data Center, not forgetting the Security aspect.
“Reduce complexity for Remote Sites”
Functional networks are Simple networks, and the same applies to SD-WAN.
The design must be foolproof. It needs to consider each application as if it had a single lane in the multi-lane motorway. Some of those lines need to prioritize VoIP and video traffic. By separating those lanes, tight security can be enforced. Sufficient bandwidth and resiliency are vital as traffic will flow to the Cloud, Data Center, and other sites. Planning and execution must be impeccable.
How are you going to integrate SD-WAN within your environment?
Another question you must ask yourself is: Is your current infrastructure in line to accept an extension of your network, such as SD-WAN?
Knowing your application at branches or campus locations, you can achieve higher performance enhancements by prioritising traffic/protocols. In SD-WAN, routing functions are performed in the Control Plane – Cloud. Inevitably, some of the traffic will need to be encrypted by the VPN to the central corporate location. At this stage, allocating enough IP addresses for management and data is also advisable. Out-of-band and LTE connections must be considered to support remote applications, services and networks.
Research: is my SD-WAN compatible with my Cloud provider?
Will connectivity to the cloud be an essential objective, if not the most important? The overall solution is where SD-WAN excels over MPLS; hence, some testing may be required. Ensure the SD-WAN hardware performs appropriately with selected Clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Some SD-WAN services sometimes provide only one option: central hub-style or through local Internet. A key driver for SD-WAN adoption is aggregating different WAN connections, like broadband and LTE, to minimise latency = delay.
It would be best to balance all the options and choose the one most suited to enjoy the benefits the SD-WAN solution fully provides.
Applications, Services, End-users and Traffic Flow
We think the best approach is to implement the design regarding the application and the infrastructure. However, that may be very academic in some scenarios. Therefore, monitoring the application’s behaviour, traffic flows, routing, bandwidth, and latency is essential. Tweaks need to be applied within a week to achieve much better performance. The output may vary even if you run two precisely the same remote sites with the same services. Based on your findings, within the first month, policies should be adjusted to provide an original path for the service and an excellent end-user experience.
Perfect time to review and update your Security Policy before migrating to SD-WAN
This is not an option. It has to be conducted in the design and testing phase, and application and services security has to be tightened to the maximum. We all know that later, this task will be precarious and skipped. Therefore, take this opportunity to review your policy, use ONLY secure protocols and encryption, and make it bulletproof. You have the chance, an almost ideal situation; you can migrate application by application and test it extensively. Remember, SD-WAN also provides direct access to the Internet, which may bring some risks if the security policy isn’t deployed correctly.
“Next-Generation WAN built with a focus on Agility.”
We would not deploy to a new client SD-WAN solution without first running Prove of Concept (PoC).
With SD-WAN, you are introducing a new model/concept. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to run PoC to discover any problems that can be identified and remediated. Additionally, any tweaks can be implemented to increase application performance and behaviour; after that, it is plain sailing. It will be much simpler to roll it out throughout the organisation.
Where should we start with the migration to SD-WAN?
Start the migration from the site, which will cause the smallest environmental impact. Please also remember the applications and choose wisely to take full advantage of SD-WAN. Consider where the applications are hosted, how they will be integrated into the cloud gateways, and how to secure connections to the Internet in the most cost-effective method. The puzzles must fit perfectly in SD-WAN to create the best access for these applications and end-users.
You cannot be blind during deployment, so perform in-depth monitoring.
Even the most basic monitoring tools will indicate where you are going wrong and whether there is an impact on the business. However, it would help if you went further and set up in-depth monitoring to verify and validate how the network is performing under stress. Check the High-Availability scenario with Active-Active connections, routing via the best-optimised bandwidth path for latency-sensitive applications. In many cases, small adjustments will be implemented to achieve the best performance.
Are you not done yet? No, please be proactive and continuously monitor the network.
Network monitoring will give you an insight into SD-WAN and to the entire infrastructure. As mentioned before, this is a new model that has to be nourished and adjusted in many areas: application performance, network policies and business requirements.
“Optimised Cloud access,
Reliable application performance and high availability,
Reduced WAN expenses.”
10 SDWAN Features and Benefits that you should be applying
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Zero-Touch Deployment
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Encryption Key Rotation
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Multiplex VPN’s
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Application-Aware Routing
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Programmable API’s
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Fully Optimised Cloud Connectivity
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Insight Data Analytics
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End-to-End Application Microsegmentation
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All in One – Firewalls, NAT, IPS, Router
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Wireless Connectivity
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Daniel Magdziarz
The Blog Post, originally penned in English, underwent a magical metamorphosis into Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish language. If any subtle content lost its sparkle, let’s summon back the original English spark.
