How SD-WAN Addresses the Cloud Migration

Applications that live in the cloud have become central to many of today’s businesses. So these organizations want to make sure they can access their applications all the time and without delay. SD-WAN can help make that happen.

“Applications are the essence of top-performing organizations today,” as Anton Jacobsz of SD-WAN distributor Networks Unlimited notes in a recent IT-Online article. “If connectivity to these applications is impaired, or worse, down, business comes to an immediate half.” And if an application is sluggish, he adds, it can decrease productivity and create user frustration.

To avoid this kind of thing, businesses are beginning to adopt SD-WAN, a network overlay solution that brings policy, and added reliability and visibility, to existing connectivity. That connectivity may include anything from cable modem and DSL broadband services to MPLS to wireless links based on LTE (News - Alert), or whatever.

Being able to assure and secure applications such as Microsoft 365 as they migrate to the cloud is really important, says Kumar Ramachandran (News - Alert), founder and CEO of SD-WAN solution provider CloudGenix. And SD-WAN can do that, he adds.

SD-WAN also can help businesses support the hybrid WAN, he says, noting that customers want to seamlessly combine multiple kinds of links as a homogenous whole, and maintain control so they are not locked into a particular service provider for access services. And, he adds, it enables the use of virtual customer premises equipment, which tends to be more affordable and flexible than traditional gear.

“As public and private cloud use continues to grow, WAN performance becomes critical to latency-sensitive and mission-critical workloads and inter-datacenter business continuity,” says Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure at research and consulting company IDC (News - Alert). “Accordingly, as enterprises plan and implement comprehensive cloud strategies, WAN architectures need to be considered alongside, and in conjunction with, data center infrastructure.”

“Moreover, as enterprises move business processes to the cloud,” continues Mehra, “there is a greater need to fully integrate cloud-sourced services into WAN environments to ensure workload/application performance, availability, and security.”