What are the benefits of SD-WAN

SD-WAN Benefits

It has become clear that SD-WAN has become the preferred option for enterprise WAN connectivity. By leveraging software-defined networking, SD-WAN offers a strong alternative to traditional MPLS networks, which rely on dedicated hardware to ensure reliability and performance.

What’s driving the adoption of SD-WAN? It effectively comes down to this: SD-WAN is more cost-effective and operationally agile than MPLS. SD-WAN reduces CAPEX and OPEX while also simplifying WAN management and scalability.

However, if you don’t drill down beyond high-level conclusions, it can be hard to quantify how SD-WAN will matter for your business. Here, we’ll dive into the top 5 SD-WAN benefits and explain why IT professionals and industry experts alike see SD-WAN as the preferred solution for connectivity for most applications.

SD-WAN benefits include:

Reduced WAN costs
Enhanced WAN flexibility.
Improved WAN agility.
Simplified WAN management.
Increased WAN availability.

Table of Contents

Reduced WAN Costs

MPLS bandwidth is expensive. On a “dollar per bit” basis, MPLS is significantly higher than public Internet bandwidth. Exactly how much more expensive will depend on a number of variables, not the least of which is location.

However, the cost of MPLS isn’t just a result of significantly higher bandwidth charges. MPLS requires provisioning physical, dedicated links, a process that can take weeks or months. In contrast, SD-WAN operates on top of existing infrastructure — such as the public Internet — so a comparable deployment may be completed in days. In business, time is money, and the greater speed of an SD-WAN deployment can be a huge competitive advantage.

Just how big of a cost difference is there between a traditional MPLS network and SD-WAN? Factors such as location and bandwidth requirements will be the real drivers here. Expecting savings of at least 25% is certainly reasonable, and for many enterprises, it can go well beyond that. For one Cato customer, MPLS was 4 times the cost of cloud-based SD-WAN despite MPLS only providing a quarter of the bandwidth.

For a real world example of how Nick Dell, an IT manager at a major auto manufacturer, optimized his WAN spending by ditching MPLS circuits and moving to an SD-WAN solution, check out this webinar.

Enhanced WAN Flexibility

The MPLS-based network was the top dog in enterprise WAN before cloud-computing and mobile smart devices exploded in popularity. Once cloud and mobile became mainstream, a fundamental flaw in MPLS was exposed. Simply put: MPLS is very good at reliably routing traffic between two static locations, but it isn’t good at meeting the demands of cloud and mobile.

With MPLS, enterprises have to deal with the “trombone effect”. Essentially, an MPLS-based WAN has to inefficiently route Internet-bound traffic from branch offices or remote locations through a corporate datacenter on both the outbound and inbound legs of its journey. This increases network latency and can degrade the performance of services like UCaaS and videoconferencing, potentially to the point of unusability.

SD-WAN enables policy-based routing (PbR) and allows enterprises to leverage the best transport method (e.g., xDSL, MPLS, cable, 5G, etc.) for the job. For example, this might mean routing latency-sensitive traffic over high-performance MPLS circuits while using less expensive media for lower-priority traffic.

In addition to solving the trombone routing problem, SD-WAN is a game changer when it comes to last-mile resilience and availability. The ability to leverage different transport methods enables a more advanced approach to link-bonding, which allows for intelligent traffic load balancing across multiple diverse connections like broadband internet, LTE, 5G, and dedicated MPLS, automatically switching between them based on network conditions to maintain optimal connectivity even if one link fails.

When looking to measure the ROI of SD-WAN, organizations should consider the following metrics:

Increased throughput of traffic over corporate WAN.
Reduced latency to critical SaaS applications (teleconferencing, etc.)
Improved accessibility and uptime for corporate applications.

To learn more, check out our blog on why cloud-based SD-WAN is the optimal approach to WAN latency.

Improved WAN Agility

MPLS wasn’t designed with agility in mind. SD-WAN, on the other hand, is designed to enable maximum agility and flexibility. By abstracting away the underlying complexities of multiple transport methods and enabling PbR, SD-WAN enables enterprises to meet the varying demands of cloud workloads and scale up or down with ease.

For example, onboarding a new office using MPLS circuits can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. With Cato’s cloud-based SD-WAN, new sites can be onboarded in a matter of hours or days. Case in point: Pet Lovers Center was able to deploy two to three sites per day during their Cato Cloud rollout.

Similarly, adding bandwidth can take over a month in many MPLS applications, while SD-WAN enables rapid bandwidth provisioning at existing sites.

SD-WAN can also streamline the implementation of security features as part of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) deployment. All WAN traffic passes through SD-WAN instances when entering and leaving the corporate WAN. This provides centralized locations for deploying key security capabilities (firewalls, IDS, etc.) and for monitoring corporate WAN traffic.

Simplified WAN Management

As we’ve mentioned, the long provisioning times using MPLS circuits can create significant bottlenecks, but MPLS management issues go well beyond that. The larger an enterprise scales, the more complex WAN management becomes. Multiple appliances used for security and WAN optimization become a maintenance and management burden as an enterprise grows. Further, gaining granular visibility into the network can be a challenge, which increases the difficulty of performing network monitoring and worsens Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) due to the difficulty of determining the source and effects of a security incident.

Cloud-based SD-WAN adds value by providing an integrated and centralized view of the network that can be easily managed at scale. This centralized visibility offers multiple benefits to the enterprise. IT teams have access to in-depth information on network performance and usage, which can inform strategic investment. For example, the knowledge that two systems — such as an application and a database server — communicate frequently might influence modifications to the corporate network to create a more direct or higher-bandwidth link between them.

Security teams could also use this insight into the network to support threat detection, deploy security solutions, and use audit logs to ensure compliance.

Increased WAN Availability

When it comes to uptime, redundancy and failover are primary considerations. While MPLS has a solid reputation for reliability, it isn’t perfect and can fail. Redundancy at the MPLS provider level can be expensive and difficult to implement due to the need for multiple independent links.

SD-WAN makes leveraging different transport methods easy, thereby enabling high-availability configurations that help reduce single points of failure. If your fiber link from one ISP is down, you can failover to a link from another provider. Further, the self-healing features of cloud-based SD-WAN make achieving high availability (HA) significantly easier than before.

Industries Benefiting From SD-WAN

SD-WAN uses the power of software-defined networking (SDN) to optimize the corporate WAN. By monitoring the health of network links and intelligently routing traffic over the network, it offers improved performance and reliability at a fraction of the cost of traditional MPLS-based network configuration.

SD-WAN has the most significant impact in industries where network flexibility, reliability, and security are vitally important. Key examples include retail, healthcare, and manufacturing.

To learn more about the power of SD-WAN and how to use it to its fullest, check out these SD-WAN use cases and success stories.

How The Retail Industry Benefits From SD-WAN

In the retail industry, low network latency contributes to a positive user experience. Poor application performance and downtime can lead to lost sales and customer churn.

SD-WAN can help retail businesses by offering flexible, reliable connectivity between a business’s central systems and various sites. This helps to improve the customer experience at checkout and enables organizations to quickly spin up new locations.

SD-WAN can also help to improve the performance of e-commerce site through policy-based routing. Network traffic is directed over the best available connection, ensuring that latency-sensitive traffic can be given priority. Additionally, all SD-WAN traffic is encrypted, which helps to meet PCI DSS compliance mandates.

Learn about how The Flügger Group gains network flexibility and security with Cato and Secher Security

How The Healthcare Industry Benefits From SD-WAN

The healthcare industry has become increasingly dependent on digital systems in recent years. Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices require reliable connectivity. Also, the growth of telemedicine has dramatically increased the volume of latency-sensitive traffic on healthcare networks.

SD-WAN solutions can help to expedite and secure traffic flowing over healthcare networks. SD-WAN traffic is encrypted — protecting patient data against eavesdropping — and use intelligent network routing to enhance the performance of IoMT devices, telemedicine, and other core healthcare applications, like EPIC. This native support for traffic encryption is essential for securing protected health information (PHI) and complying with the requirements of HIPAA and other healthcare regulations.

Learn about how Häfele recovered from ransomware thanks to Cato SASE Cloud

How The Manufacturing Industry Benefits From SD-WAN

As manufacturing moves into Industry 3.0, traditional air-gapped Operational Technology (OT) networks are increasingly a thing of the past. Instead, manufacturing systems are connected to and centrally managed by IT networks.

This has numerous potential impacts for manufacturing networks and systems. In these environments, uptime is critically important, so network outages and latency can dramatically impact performance. Additionally, OT systems commonly lack up-to-date security, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.

SD-WAN can help manufacturers to transition successfully to Industry 3.0. Protocol-aware routing enables organizations to prioritize latency-sensitive OT traffic. Additionally, encryption of SD-WAN traffic can protect against eavesdropping and unauthorized access to vulnerable systems.

Find out how O-I tapped augmented reality and Cato SASE Cloud to realize “impossible-to-count” savings.

The Cloud-Based Advantage

We’ve already mentioned a few ways cloud-based SD-WAN helps magnify benefits, but it is also important to note that cloud-based SD-WAN overcomes one of the major SD-WAN objections MPLS proponents have put forth. In the past, it could have been argued that the lack of SLAs when using the Internet meant SD-WAN solutions were not ready for enterprise deployments. However, with the Cato SASE Cloud Platform, enterprises get all the benefits of SD-WAN, an integrated security stack, and an SLA-backed private backbone supported by Tier-1 ISPs across the globe.

Furthermore,implementing SD-WAN on a private backbone addresses one of the biggest limitations of SD-WAN running on the public Internet: latency across the globe. For international enterprises that must send traffic halfway across the world, routing WAN over the public Internet alone can lead to significant latency. Historically, achieving high performance would force companies to use expensive MPLS circuits.

However, cloud-based SD-WAN offers a more cost-effective and operationally-efficient alternative. Cato’s global, private backbone has Points of Presence (PoPs) across the world that enable traffic to be reliably routed at speeds that meet or exceed MPLS-level performance.

SD-WAN outperforms MPLS for the modern enterprise

While there is no one-size-fits-all answer to every WAN challenge, it’s clear that the majority of modern enterprises can benefit from SD-WAN. We can expect to see MPLS hold a niche in the market for years to come, but SD-WAN is better suited for most modern use cases. In particular, cloud-based SD-WAN gives businesses a reliable, secure, and modern alternative that offers the agility of SD-WAN without sacrificing reliability or the peace of mind that SLAs provide.

To learn more about what cloud-based SD-WAN and SASE can do for your business, read what is SASE or contact us today.

FAQ

Why is SD-WAN better than traditional MPLS networks?

SD-WAN uses link aggregation and health monitoring to choose the optimal path to route network traffic. This offers improved performance over broadband networks and is a more cost-effective alternative than multi-label protocol switching (MPLS) circuits.

What is the main goal of SD-WAN?

SD-WAN’s primary goal is to improve network agility and flexibility. It does so by intelligently selecting the best route over available network media.