Today, more enterprises are considering implementing SD-WAN in an effort to save costs and improve application performance. In order to prevent SD-WAN deployments from failing, however, it is critical to avoid the risk factors associated with implementation.
Implementing SD-WAN
By implementing SD-WAN, organisations can improve overall business performance, while reducing dependence on legacy MPLS. Nevertheless, a whitepaper from Infovista insists that SD-WAN should also provide clear visibility into how every application is performing.
It must also offer a mechanism to allow the user to control the performance level for every application. Next, SD-WAN should enable each individual application session to securely move from one network link to another, rather than moving all sessions simultaneously.
In addition to this, SD-WAN needs to automatically detect the best path or link for every session. It must also centralise management for monitoring and control of all devices, without the need to physically touch each one.
Finally, SD-WAN should provide a cloud-agnostic approach that enhances performance for on-premises and cloud-based applications with equal success. While SD-WAN promises to deliver these benefits, a number of SD-WAN deployments experience significant issues.
How can we prevent SD-WAN deployments from failing?
In order to prevent SD-WAN deployments from failing, enterprises must avoid four key risk factors. First of all, insufficient planning can result in flawed deployments and ultimately lead to project abandonment.
Next, a lack of QoS sophistication causes the inability to solve performance problems in key applications, requiring a re-engineering of SD-WAN deployment. Moreover, Infovista notes that businesses may also have to retain MPLS circuits for mission-critical or latency-prone traffic and push lower priority traffic to business Internet.
Rollout complexity is also worth considering, as businesses can end up overspending when there is a constant need to fine-tune the solution. As a result, this can potentially stall deployment, negate any bandwidth cost savings, or ultimately lead to abandonment.
Finally, a lack of automation is also potentially damaging as enterprises should be able to resolve "routine bottlenecks" with minimal or no human intervention. In order to avoid the aforementioned risk factors, Infovista developed Ipanema SD-WAN portfolio.
Avoiding risk factors
In effect, Ipanema takes the complexity out of hybrid WAN and SDWAN and automates processes for both on-premises and cloud-based applications. In turn, this ensures that the network does not "become the bottleneck."
Ipanema thus helps to guarantee the success of an enterprise’s entire digital application portfolio ― under any network conditions. Above all, Ipanema maximises end-user satisfaction and prevents a poor customer experience due to suboptimal network performance.
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