Reexamining the fast-paced, ultra-competitive SD-WAN landscape

CIOs in nearly every industry recognize the benefits Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) can bring to their organizations. SD-WAN is proven to deliver better performance and greater control over traditional WAN infrastructure and the application traffic flowing across the network. SD-WAN technology is built specifically to handle all of today’s cloud-based applications, providing increased network efficiency and giving CIOs the agility they need to manage exponential traffic growth. 

With the right SD-WAN in place, network administrators can orchestrate traffic automatically, deploy applications faster, provide exceptional user experience, and bring down costs. But not all SD-WAN solutions and providers are the same, and with the technology changing so quickly, how can you determine the best fit for your organization?

Here are five key considerations to help you determine the right SD-WAN platform and provider for your needs:

1. Experience. With dozens of available SD-WAN platforms offered by more than 150 providers, the SD-WAN landscape continues to expand. In this environment of numerous startups and continuous acquisitions, it’s essential to identify solutions that will be there for the long haul – companies with the people, processes, and financial stability to perform well globally, over time.
2. Performance. The best SD-WAN providers will have the engineering support to customize the solution for your specific business needs. The differentiators between solutions are highly dependent upon the ways the platforms are designed to handle traffic, cloud application flows, and security. Today’s most advanced solutions can identify individual application flows, like a single phone call or app stream, and will duplicate and reassemble failing flows across connections. Additionally, the most effective platforms will provide cloud gateways and guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) of SaaS applications like Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce–and even for existing UCaaS environments.
3. Flexibility. The SD-WAN solution must work with and boost the performance of your existing MPLS or Hybrid WAN infrastructure and provide the option for installation as a standalone MPLS replacement. Also, ideal solutions will give you the ability to deploy in both concentrated regions and global branch environments. 
4. Agility. An experienced SD-WAN provider can help you assign specific policies to control and direct WAN traffic and align application priority, security, and performance with business intent. The platform will have a highly detailed level of manager visibility and control of traffic and application performance across every location.
5. Security. Along with enabling extensive visibility into both data center or Software as a Service (SaaS) application use, the SD-WAN provider will help you apply network-wide security and business policies. Additionally, they will assist with the deployment of local, third-party cloud security services wherever needed to extend the WAN perimeter from the cloud to each branch.

We know choosing a provider to deliver on your precise, strategic SD-WAN business goals can be a daunting task. The decision involves not only the considerations we’ve laid out above but also aligning the value proposition with the overall costs for implementation and ongoing support. Ideally, we want to empower CIOs with the flexibility to engineer an SD-WAN solution with the best combination of traffic management and control technologies while improving the performance and security of cloud applications across all branches and users.

For CBTS, VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud gives our clients the best combination of financial stability, global reach and support, industry-leading features, customization options, and the security they need to handle the exponential growth in network traffic. Moreover, the VeloCloud solution can be deployed on existing WAN and UCaaS infrastructure to improve application performance, network visibility, and VoIP traffic while reducing branch network costs. Finally, our longstanding partnership with VMware means our clients have access to our in-house engineers and technical support experts who understand the technology and have the relationships to ensure success.

Learn more about the SD-WAN solution from CBTS.

To learn more about how advanced VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud capabilities like Dynamic Multi-Path Optimization (DMPO) and cloud gateways can give you a competitive advantage, download our SD-WAN Tool Kit and request a free 90-day proof of concept.