Software Defined Wide Area Network, SD- Wan, is the most recent technology in the Enterprise network space today. Basically, centralizing the network’s management for IT folks. With a lot of Enterprise and multi-location companies looking to simplify the management of their networks, The SD-WAN market is expected to reach the billions in the next few years.

 

The idea behind the technology is pretty simple. Each location on your network will have a data connection or two, hopefully, separate ISP’s and technology for redundancy. Those data connections will terminate into your SD-WAN box and off you go. Depending on the SD-WAN provider you chose, the box will contain your router and firewall. To connect all your locations privately, the software creates an encrypted tunnel on each side over the public internet, just like your VPN box does today. The difference is, you have a centralized portal to manage and push policies across your entire network as oppose to having to log into each VPN box to create the tunnel. If you have 2 separate data connections at each location, you can build a failover in case one of the data connections fail. Some SD-WAN providers will have load balancing capabilities too. So, if one of your data connections is being over utilized, you can manage the SD-Wan boxes to use the other data connection instead. There are also capabilities for Quality of Service (QOS). This is where you give priority to certain applications your network uses.