It is no secret today that the world is changing, and this is also true for the world of WAN – Wide Area Network. The digital transformation is currently experiencing with the popularization of technology in all aspects of our daily lives is also generating new challenges for the world of Networking, and we can see this reflected in the latest market reports on SD-WAN.

In the reports we can see how the traditional division that used to be made for Corporate WAN devices has been divided into two different categories:

• Traditional routers – Enterprise
• SD-WAN devices

The evolution perspectives of the sector that analysists point to, indicate that the traditional router sector will get smaller in the next few years and be replaced by SD-WAN hardware.

The concept of SD-WAN (Software-defined Wide Area Network) began to be standardized at the beginning of the 21st century, making it, therefore, quite an old concept and, to some extent, parallel with the Cloud Computing concept – which arose in the 1960s, but whose first written reference is not found until 1996 Compaq report from George Favaloro[1] . Thus, both concepts run roughly alongside each other. This, together with the fact that some of the first cloud computing services were VPN-related services, made it only a matter of time before they ended up converging.

The Cloud as a service platform

Leading players in the sector have cloud platforms that offer great advantages for developing SD-WAN control systems. Here we highlight a few of them:

1. Unlimited performance

For practical purposes, Cloud platforms have unlimited scalability. This prevents, on the one hand, the expected large growth in user numbers over the next few years from negatively affecting the viability and functioning of the system. On the other hand, it ensures the availability of services whose implementation in on-premise environments would otherwise be tremendously expensive – in terms of the environment we are dealing with, the following which are worth mentioning:

• Big Data BI (Business Intelligence) [2] systems, heavily reliant on storage, non-relational database systems and analysis engines like BizSpark and Apache-Hadoop.
• AI systems such as machine learning that can build intelligent systems to assist with management and detecting trends early.

2. Global geographical distribution

The systems in a globalized market must be equally accessible to all potential clients, and for this reason, the geographical distribution available to the Cloud takes on a special relevance (for example, one major Cloud platform player has a service in 54 geographic regions). Additionally, these platforms already have several mechanisms established that allow the developed and geographically dispersed systems to operate uniformly, e.g., Global CDN (Content Delivery Network).

3. Security and compliance

Cloud system security can be viewed from several different perspectives:

• Security against attacks and intrusions, for which the most advanced and updated mechanisms in the market are available.
  Security against data loss, dependent on backup and disaster recovery plans, for which the cloud platforms themselves enable proven implementation mechanisms often backup up by the geographical distribution mentioned in the previous point.
• Security relating to legislation – Compliance: This latter type of security is often more complex to implement because, by having a global distribution, it must comply with different legislation. For this reason, having the certifications already undertaken by the various Cloud platforms becomes an indispensable lever to reach and provide services in different markets.

4. Cost and scaling

In a way, this advantage encompasses all the advantages seen above. Cloud platforms offer processing, storage, communications, compliance, etc., always on the basis of the lowest price possible. The principle is that overall system operating costs are adjusted to what users actually consume through a flexible system whose costs scale linearly with the number of users or managed points in the case of SD-WAN. There is no need to overprovision as we’ve been doing with traditional on-premise systems.

In summary, from a technological standpoint we are facing an exciting period of great changes, and we are in the best position to take advantage of them. At Teldat we work on a daily basis to be able to offer our clients the best solutions possible. The future is now!

[1] Name of the report: “Internet solutions division strategy for Cloud Computing”
[2] Big Data refers to data sets or combinations of data whose size (volume), complexity (variability) and speed of growth (speed) make it difficult to capture, manage, process or analyze them using conventional tools and technologies.