Organisations’ bandwidth requirements have grown quite dramatically due to the increased number of devices on their networks, the use of cloud resources and the rise in video streaming. Those increased demands are exceeding the capacity of existing MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) links while the highly labour-intensive management requirements of traditional wide area networks (WANs) are becoming unsustainable in the new environment. This is leading many organisations to turn to SD-WAN (software defined wide area network) solutions.
“SD-WAN has now become the norm for customers to deploy,” says Karl McDermott, head of Connected Solutions with Three Ireland. It gives customers centralised control of their network, he adds.
“If you have a large retail chain with 100 outlets around the country, you need two routers – one primary and one backup, for each premises,” says McDermott. “You need routers for the headquarters and the data centre as well. All of the outlets will have a fibre connection with the backup being wireless or maybe copper. Prior to SD-WAN you had no real idea what was happening across the network.”
With a traditional WAN, engineers and administrators have to manually write rules and policies for each router on the network. This is not only time-consuming but can also be error prone.
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“If want to say that till traffic should be prioritised over customer wifi, you have to go to all 100 routers to do it,” says McDermott. “SD-WAN allows you to do that from one place. You have centralised control and you don’t need to have lots of engineers out setting up routers.”
In addition, SD-WANs are designed to monitor the performance of WAN connections and manage traffic in an effort to maintain high speeds and optimise connectivity.
“If you are seeing congestion in the network you can respond immediately,” McDermott points out. “If you have a 100Mb connection to your HQ and network traffic is slowing down, the old solution might have been to put in a 500Mb connection because you didn’t know what was causing the congestion. With an SD-WAN you can see what’s causing it.
“For example, it might be due to a major data drop scheduled for 3pm every day while other things are happening on the network. You can reschedule that to 3am to solve the congestion problem very simply and you can do it centrally with no need to send engineers out.”
McDermott describes that enhanced capability as being like a light bulb going on.
“You can see what traffic is on the network at any time,” he says. “If it needs more bandwidth at certain times, you don’t necessarily have to upgrade or put in new infrastructure. You can simply prioritise certain things.
“You can give point-of-sale device traffic high priority and assign a lower priority to email. The email will go when there is bandwidth available and it won’t compete with point-of-sale or other important traffic for it.”
The SD-WAN solution also makes better use of existing infrastructure. “In the traditional network set up, all of the sites have two routers and two connections,” he explains. “The SD-WAN allows both of them to be used whereas previously one of them was purely for backup. It makes the network a lot more efficient.”
There are other benefits as well. “Prior to SD-WAN, companies would have put in private circuits for a lot of connections,” McDermott explains. “That’s very expensive but many organisations needed to do it if they required dedicated connections. SD-WAN can go across the internet instead. One of our customers no longer needs a private circuit to connect them with their office in India as a result.”
He also points to the simplicity for organisations opening new branches. “They can just send a router out to the location and it can be set up very quickly and easily. That’s particularly good for retailers and food service businesses with lots of branches.”
It’s very easy to add the latest intrusion detection and prevention systems and link it into a lot of the more dynamic threat solutions
— Karl McDermott
Security is also enhanced. “With centralised management you can set security policies from one place,” McDermott says. “You can encrypt traffic and put in frameworks for intrusion prevention and detection all from one central location.
“Also, an SD-WAN can be integrated into existing security systems. For example, the Cisco Meraki Umbrella SD-WAN connector offered by Three makes it simple to deploy cloud security across an SD-WAN with only a few clicks. It’s also very easy to add the latest intrusion detection and prevention systems and link it into a lot of the more dynamic threat solutions.
“These utilise central monitoring and analytics to look for anomalies which might be linked to security attack. For example, if the CRM application is suddenly starting to use more bandwidth the system will look at that to determine the cause.”
5G connectivity is playing an important role. “It is a game-changer in connectivity,” says McDermott. “It can exceed copper in speed and match fibre for bandwidth in many cases. We can provide SD-WAN with 5G baked in along with wired technology and manage it from our support centre in Limerick.
“We look after a lot of large retailers in Ireland. If you put in an SD-WAN it needs to be managed, deployed and maintained. The core business of customers is not network management – but it is ours. That’s why they outsource it to companies like Three who are particularly good at it.”
But there is no need to discard existing systems. “You can put SDWAN on top of MPLS systems. It’s not a competition. The two things can work together,” says McDermott.
He concludes by explaining that organisations should not expect SD-WAN to deliver significant cost reductions.
“A lot of people think SD-WAN will reduce costs. That’s not necessarily the case,” he says. “Where you can save some cost is by using the internet instead of a private circuit but if you need guaranteed performance that may not be an option.
“What it does is make existing infrastructure a lot more efficient. It offers better management and control and makes changes easier but not necessarily cheaper.”