What Is SDWAN and Its Benefits?

Software Defined WAN or better known as SDWAN is an application of SDN technology to control WAN and is very useful if you have hundreds to thousands of branches. In fact, the application of SDN technology has been applied for a long time, one of which is the WLAN implementation where WLC controls many APs.

Technically, SDWAN has a very significant difference compared to traditional WAN, when you run the traditional WAN concept, you need to remote to each WAN device in the branch when installing, changing configuration, upgrading and so on. Meanwhile, by using SDWAN, everything will be done from a single or centralized dashboard and is very, very helpful for an organization that has hundreds to thousands of outlets.

So what are the benefits of using SDWAN instead of using a Traditional WAN?

Peformance Improvement
One of the benefits of using SDWAN is a very significant increase in link performance, almost all SDWAN platforms provide traffic engineering features that are capable of doing this, for example, such as application pinning, application aware routing, and so on. The failover process when one of the WAN links is down is also very fast, on average 1-3 seconds RTO is faster than traditional technology.

Easy and Fast Operation
The centralized dashboard helps the operational team to make configuration and monitoring easier and you can imagine how helpful the operational team is to handle many outlets or branches with this method, configuration changes, upgrades, and monitoring activities are all done from a single dashboard. In addition, almost all SDWAN platforms also provide zero-touch-provisioning technology that allows you to only bring the router to the branch / outlet when the initial installation process and configuration will be automatically installed on the router, this is very helpful for time-to-market if you are required. quickly make changes and business expansion.

OPEX Reduction
One of the benefits of SDWAN is that it reduces operational costs, most of the use-cases and success stories of SDWAN are the operational costs of paying for links to very large providers before using SDWAN, on average they use 2 private links (MPLS / Metro-E) as link to HO. One of the secrets of SDWAN is a very easy traffic engineering technique that can easily and safely utilize cheaper internet links as WAN links. This has a big impact not only on operational costs but also on the performance of the link itself, where internet links usually have a greater capacity than private links (MPLS / Metro-E).