SD-WAN

SD-WAN Overview

SD-WAN is fundamentally about efficiency. It comes down to giving the people who work for you the tools they need to compete and win on a global stage – the ultimate responsibility of upper management. It touches your customers too – in a situation where network capacity becomes limited for whatever reason, SD-WAN gives you the power to prioritize bandwidth, ensuring that the applications most critical to customer experience don’t skip a beat.

WHAT IS SD-WAN?

Software-Defined – Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) is a combination of technologies designed to offer a simpler approach to the WAN. It’s being driven largely by the decreasing cost of bandwidth and the increase in cloud applications that reside outside of the legacy data center. SD-WAN can be deployed over existing WAN connections, whether they are Internet (DIA, broadband, LTE) or private (MPLS, private line), in order to create a secure, private, fully meshed network. It offers simplified management, quicker turnup, better application performance, improved resiliency, and cost savings when compared to traditional approaches.

SERVICES

Broadband: a high speed connection to the internet
DIA (Dedicated Internet Access): guarantees users always receive their purchased bandwidth, as opposed to shared connections where the bandwidth purchased represents the maximum speed 
MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching): a routing technique designed to speed up and shape traffic flows across enterprise wide area and service provider networks
VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service): a VPN (virtual private network) that connects geographically dispersed local area network sites across an MPLS backbone
Private Line: a private data connection securely connecting two or more locations with high data speeds, without traversing the public internet
Layer 2: the network layer used to transfer data between adjacent network nodes in a wide area network or between nodes on the same local area network
Fixed Wireless: wireless devices or systems in fixed locations such as homes and offices
Satellite: transmission of data via orbiting satellites