SD-WAN: Solving Business Problems with Technology
Can you manage this yourself? Does your team have the expertise and the capacity to take on an SD WAN service in addition to the rest of the workflow and things that they need to do? SD WAN is not a one size fits all widget. It is just not something that you can say, oh, let's solve all your problems. We're gonna give you an SD WAN, and that's gonna take care of everything.
Speaker 1:Knowing what you're buying and why you're buying it is massively important. Otherwise, you're gonna fall into some pitfalls. Conversation I'm having all the time now is related to SD WAN. And, really, let's just start with what does SD WAN even mean in the first place? So SD WAN is software defined WAN.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? I mean, that means basically anything. In tech, when you have any sort of term that's defined by an analyst group or a piece of marketing, now you have every other marketing department from every other vendor and service provider that chases that terminology because it's tailwinds. It's it's the entire industry has moved that way. Clients are starting to use that term to check boxes in the RFPs, and these all become things that, you know, have to happen.
Speaker 1:So when we look at SD WAN and we start talking about SD WAN with our clients, you know, really what we're looking for is we're trying to understand the nuance. What is the business problem they're trying to solve and what SD WAN actually solves that problem? So even the things like, you know, do you need SD WAN because you just want a web based configuration with auto configured VPNs? You know, lots of good firewall appliances in the market will do that. You log into the web page.
Speaker 1:You configure 2 firewalls in 2 locations. You say, I want a VPN between these two sites, and boom, you have a VPN. It's magic. Or do you need SD WAN because you need circuit failover? But what conditions are gonna trigger that circuit failover?
Speaker 1:How are you testing traffic across that circuit? Are you looking for just the circuits going up or down? Are you looking for performance across the circuit? Do you wanna do traffic duplication, pack prioritization? Are you expecting layer 7?
Speaker 1:You you know, I mean, that's Pandora's box right there. Or, you know, are you looking for SD WAN as an MPLS alternative? Do you need something to do in simulate an MPLS as either a MPLS replacement, or are you doing instead of having 2 MPLS networks, you're gonna have one networks, you're gonna have 1 MPLS network with 1 SD WAN delivered MPLS network? What's your network architecture? You can do overlay or underlay.
Speaker 1:Are you spoken hub or all of your sites' islands? Are you trying to improve application performance? Are you protecting a critical application? Do you have voice traffic running across this thing? Do you have something that's, you know, disparate locations with slow network links or high packet loss or high latency?
Speaker 1:Are you dealing with transoceanic network links with distributed applications? Are you hosting a prem application on premise still? Do you need inbound survivability of an IP address so that application can be highly available for a circuit failover? Do you have the capacity of running and supporting BGP? You know, less than 2% of all network engineers globally configure and maintain BGP.
Speaker 1:Do you have that unicorn working for you? Can you afford the equipment in order to run routers that can support BGP? Do you need an SD WAN to do it for you? How are you gonna manage double NAT? How are you gonna manage NAT boundary transition issues with circuit failover?
Speaker 1:Can you manage this yourself? Does your team have the expertise and the capacity to take on an SD WAN service in addition to the rest of the workflow and things that they need to do. SD WAN is not a one size fits all widget. It is just not something that you can say, oh, let's solve all your problems. We're gonna give you an SD WAN, and that's gonna take care of everything.
Speaker 1:Knowing what you're buying and why you're buying it is massively important. Otherwise, you're gonna fall into some pitfalls. I mean, there's a really good SD WAN service in the market that does, delivers their service via, tunnels to PoPs, so they control you know, they have gateways, and they do some phenomenal things in terms of QoS and packetization and application redundancy. But it reduces the MTU size because you're doing tunnel inside of tunnel. Can your application support reduced MTU sizes or not?
Speaker 1:You know, these are things that if you've not deployed this before, you can fall into some, there's a lot of little holes that you fall into. So SD WAN has become a, this is just another one of my little like things I get to laugh about when we're talking to people that have an understanding of a buzzword, but not necessarily the technology or what they're actually trying to solve for. And part of the reason why when I'm in this conversation, I take a few steps back and we start talking about what the business is doing, what the applications are doing, and what is the business problem that we're actually trying to solve for. Is there a business problem that we're trying to solve for? Is there an issue that needs to be overcome?
Speaker 1:Is there an advantage or an efficiency that we can create? What are we actually looking for in terms of a you know, an in state, and how do we make people's lives better? You know? Fundamentally, you're talking about delivering an application that somebody has to use in order to do work. And if you can make their life better, they're gonna be more productive, and the business is gonna be more successful.
Speaker 1:So SD WAN is a phenomenal piece of technology. I would just say that you have to know which SD WAN you're buying and why you're buying it.
