Benefits offered by SD-WAN to enterprises: Ravi Jha, NTT – Netmagic

DQ: How is SD-WAN bringing forth the next generation WAN connectivity solution for Indian enterprises? What are the ways in which SD-WAN is connecting users to applications in a cost-efficient WAN topology?

Ravi Jha: Agility, flexibility, and the ease of managing the entire network from a single-window are of utmost importance in today’s cloud-centric environment. SD-WAN makes it possible for enterprises to link users with the applications in an economical WAN topology. It is not restricted by the type of network whether it is wireless, wireline networks, and public internet or even in cases where the applications are hosted in data centres or on public clouds. This helps the organization’s branch offices to direct traffic to the internet where it is not needed to have a costlier MPLS line in place.

DQ: What are some of the benefits of SD-WAN?

Ravi Jha: SD-WAN offers a number of benefits to enterprises:

• It facilitates the management of the entire network with a single-window across all nodes and components. This offers a great deal of flexibility for organizations to build superior operational scalability and agility without the need to allocate any extra resources.
• In SD-WAN, all the components of the network are defined by the software. Thus, organizations can dynamically provision or allocate as well as de-allocate network resources and specialized services including firewalls, VPNs, and user-controls.
• SD-WAN is highly beneficial for organizations that need to expand their networks fast while managing dynamic loads. Irrespective of whether it is on-site or cloud-based, SD-WAN solution provides you a single-window central interface (including dashboards and monitoring tools, allowing a consolidated view of network performance.
• Our configurable SD-WAN technology is compatible with the existing network setups. This gives organizations the benefit of reusing their current WAN infrastructure (including MPLS devices, routers, etc.). There is very little need for infrastructure upgradation.

DQ: Some trends you see in this space in 2020?

Ravi Jha: The SD-WAN market has witnessed a great transformation. Companies are seamlessly using a mix of broadband, MPLS and other network sources. Some other trends in the SD-WAN space in 2019 are as follows.

Efficiency concerns about traditional WAN

For quite some time, it has been a challenge for traditional WANs to provide the desired performance and availability levels. The standard MPLS-based architectures with dated security and governance protocols are now considered as inefficient, and a cause of unwanted latency. This will make the move to a dynamically configurable, adaptive and economical option such as SD-WAN, an easy decision to make for the CIOs.

Multimedia proliferation

In the last few years, multimedia has become a preferred tool to share business information. Verticals like marketing, human resources, training, sales and others use multimedia to interact with the internal stakeholders and also the customers. Organizations are becoming increasingly capable in areas like analytics. There is greater interaction between mobile and consumer devices and there are several data types to be shared. Traditional WAN doesn’t provide ample bandwidth to manage large multimedia volumes and other transactional data as needed in a regular enterprise environment. This is another phenomenon driving the growth of SD-WAN.

Hybrid IT

Hybrid IT is becoming prevalent, further leading to systems and platforms outside the enterprise firewall becoming more important within the enterprise. For regular networks to work optimally in the hybrid environment, IT would have to over provision the network resources. This is where SD-WAN gives the flexibility to manage your cloud resources in an optimized manner.

Unpredictability of business needs

With the evolution of markets and consumers, companies need to ensure that they have networks that can handle things like performance, availability, latency, and security. SD-WAN is a more economical way to build these capabilities in future.