What makes SD-WAN crucial for achieving Cloud success?

Posted by Shayamal Kumar on September 17th, 2018

The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4 percent in 2018 to total 6.4 billion, up from 3.5 billion in 2017, according to Gartner, Inc. 

A recent article “How Amazon Web Services is luring banks to the cloud, highlights how some Enterprises have already moved to public cloud. An interesting fact to observe is that although many enterprises have stringent regulatory compliance requirements, they still have shifted to cloud. This highlights three things – the maturity of using public cloud services, the trust these organizations have in using public cloud is high and the need for speed and agility – without compromising performance, security and reliability.

The fastest-growing segment of the market is cloud system infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service or IaaS), which is forecast to grow 35.9 percent in 2018 to reach .8 billion

The Journey to Cloud with SD-WAN

Enterprises are enhancing their network as more applications are being added to the cloud. They have realized that to infuse more mobility and digital capabilities the role of network is imperial. A fast, reliable and secure network is a critical element of IT technology Stack today. Solutions like SD-WAN (software defined Wide area network) has the ability to fine-tune enterprise network into robust, fast, reliable and resilient. It holds the key to success in the cloud era. As enterprises are deploying more applications in the cloud, the new norm is a multi-cloud ecosystem. This allows enterprises to leverage private and as well as public cloud-based services making SD-WAN crucial for achieving cloud success

97% CIOs eye on SD-WAN to meet Networking demands of Digital Transformation DX

Traditional WAN architectures were not designed keeping in mind cloud-driven data consumption models. MPLS has been the chosen technology for Enterprise Networking till now. Even today businesses with zero cloud intervention find MPLS suitable for their networking requirements. However with growing digitization and SaaS applications needing Cloud access, Internet access and broadband connectivity needs to worked into the core network topology. The increasing need for dynamic Cloud computing makes SD-WAN crucial for achieving cloud success. It not only eliminates challenges and complexities of legacy network infrastructures but also brings in advanced benefits for cloud like improved application performance.

Empowering Cloud Initiatives with SD-WAN

The right SD-WAN solution will offer a centralized intelligence, control, security and performance to Wide Area Networks. You simply need to place SD-WAN in your enterprise locations or branches, and log in to the Cloud Controller to operate your network. Let’s look closer at the capabilities that SD-WAN can offer to help steer your cloud strategy smoothly on the public cloud:

Dynamic Multipathing

      Quality based link load balancing

·         Traffic steering

·         Capacity Based Load Balancing

·         WAN Transport Independence

Network Segmentation

         Network Groups

·         Encryption Key Management

·         Encryption Policies

·         VPN Topologies

Network Security

       Web Security

·         Data Protection

·         Threat Prevention

·         Bandwidth Management

Network Policies

     Quality of Service (QoS) Policy

·         Load Balancing Policy

·         Application & User Policies

·         WAN Policy

LAN Management

·         Wi-Fi Management

·         VLAN Management

In conclusion:

Is SD-WAN crucial for achieving Cloud success?

Yes. By 2019, “cloud” will be ubiquitous term, like “network,” as business solutions assume use of public cloud as a common asset.

 “As it enters its second decade, cloud computing is increasingly becoming a vehicle for next-generation digital business, as well as for agile, scalable and elastic solutions,” says David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “CIOs and other IT leaders need to constantly adapt their strategies to leverage cloud capabilities.”

Lavelle Networks can explain how SD-WAN can empower enterprise WAN. If your enterprise has already started the cloud itinerary, we can help you explore the challenges SD-WAN aims to address in building a successful cloud strategy.