SD-WAN Efficiently Combats Demanding Applications and Services

A large and problematic gap exists at the moment between what businesses need in terms of communications and IT technology and what systems and services are capable of delivering. With cloud computing becoming ubiquitous and the technology sector moving toward applications and services, the heat is on businesses to ensure application and service performance meets expectations.

The industry is rapidly embracing an innovative and commonsense approach to these issues on a number of fronts, using software to define networking, data center and application performance. Applying this concept to application usage in the enterprise, particularly as more and more businesses move toward complex and distributed wide area networks (WANs), produces the efficiencies, cost savings and high levels of application performance necessary to keep apace with today’s technology demands.

Companies like CloudGenix specialize in the software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), using network intelligence and policy-based rules and language to offer a high-performance and comprehensive way to build and manage an enterprise WAN. The company’s CloudGenix ION offering gleans intelligence from a centralized control plane to offer customers vendor independence, cost reduction and massive networking flexibility.

“Today’s business trends reflect widespread adoption of the cloud, virtualization and mobile — all technologies whose benefits are diminished with the limitations of hardware-based WANs,” said Kumar Ramachandran (News - Alert), CEO and co-founder of CloudGenix. “With our application-defined networking model, CloudGenix SD-WAN delivers direct cloud access, elimination of proprietary hardware, and 50 percent to 70 percent reduced WAN costs.”

One of the main benefits of the SD-WAN is the ability to let businesses control their complex distributed networks from a single command point. They also have the freedom to scale and adjust network resources on the fly, critical to achieving and maintaining optimum application and service performance.

The software-defined approach also lets businesses easily deploy network services and direct traffic across the WAN from one central location, without the need to make code changes. Network services and policies are also easily assigned based on user, location or specific applications and services, making it easy to keep track of users and activity.

Simply put, the SD-WAN is an ideal fit for today’s complex distributed networks, which often include various flavors of cloud computing and virtualization. And the market is growing exponentially, with IDC (News - Alert) estimating the overall SD-WAN industry will increase in value from $225 million last year to $6 billion by 2020. That’s an aggressive 90 percent CAGR, with 30 percent of enterprise communications professionals planning to migrate to SD-WAN over the next two years. Any business struggling to meet the demands of high-performance applications and services on a growing and complex enterprise WAN can benefit tremendously from the software-defined approach.