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FINAL WORD
“
INCREASED
PERFORMANCE DEMANDS
AND DISTRIBUTED
NETWORK RESOURCES
OFTEN UNDERMINE
THE EFFECTIVENESS
OF MANY TRADITIONAL
CYBERSECURITY TOOLS.
take a security-first approach to selecting
an SD-WAN solution that merges integrated
and automated security tools with best-of-
breed SD-WAN functionality.
Such an approach will enable enterprises
to reduce WAN complexity in order to
meet many of their growing Digital
Transformation requirements without
sacrificing security or network performance
in the process. Here is a short list of criteria to
consider when evaluating SD-WAN solutions:
Breadth and depth of
application awareness
business function, making the network more
efficient and responsive. ability to automatically adapt as network
configurations and resources change.
As a result, customers need to understand
the application landscape supported by an
SD-WAN solution. This includes how many
applications are supported, the prioritisation
of applications based on business criticality,
and the ability to look deep into individual
applications in order to set different policies
for sub-applications. This level of granular
insight helps enterprises to better allocate
resources to increase productivity and reduce
business costs. Look for features such as automated
multipath intelligence that tracks granular
WAN path information, such as latency, jitter
and packet loss in order to select the most
efficient route for SaaS, Voice over IP (VoIP),
and other business-critical traffic.
WAN efficiency
One of the main advantages of an SD-WAN
strategy is its ability to improve the network
user experience by routing applications over
the most efficient WAN connection at any
point in time.
SD-WAN enables branches to uplevel their
focus from traditional packet routing to
business centric applications, enabling IT
teams to map WAN resources directly to
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One of the challenges created by many
SD-WAN solutions is the need for continual
optimisation. So unless you have IT
resources to spare, you need to look for
solutions that have simple configurations
that allow you to set WAN policies based on
considerations such as application criticality,
performance requirements, and security
policies and a lot of automation, such as the
If the primary WAN path degrades below
your policy-based thresholds, the SD-WAN
solutions should be able to automatically fail
over to the next best available link without
impacting application performance. However,
defining SLAs can sometimes be cumbersome,
which means you need to look for solutions
that make SLA configuration simple.
Likewise, any efficient SD-WAN solution also
needs to be transport agnostic. This not only
includes support for a variety of connectivity
protocols (Ethernet, 3G/4G, VPN, etc.) but also
allows you to use any two of these connections
in active-active mode while load balancing
traffic across both circuits simultaneously.
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