Now that companies are increasingly relying on cloud applications, are rolling out new or temporary offices more quickly and are supporting large-scale working from home, traditional WANs are having a harder and harder time trying to keep up. SD-WAN offers an appropriate solution to all these issues.
WANs or Wide Area Networks are a familiar concept. These networks use MPLS or VPN to link a company's various sites. The fact that the routing configuration between those locations remains static was never a big problem until now. These days, however, a WAN is less and less adequate. This has a lot to do with the use of cloud applications, users who are constantly moving between different locations and companies that want an easy way to add temporary locations, such as pop-up stores, to their network.
The reasons why a traditional WAN won't always meet today's needs is partly down to practical problems. For example, the time between requesting and rolling out a new MPLS line can often be measured in weeks or months. Once tha challenge is resolved, with a WAN capacity-related problems are increasingly likely. Providing your employees with the latest and greatest devices will only lead to frustration if the applications can still only run slowly over the network.