As companies increase adoption of cloud infrastructure and services, remote work, and new business applications at edge locations, they are are re-thinking network and security strategies.
Traditional WAN
architectures are inefficient, pricey to maintain, increase IT workloads and
hamper end-users’ application experience. Additionally, these WANs’ antiquated
nature lacks end-to-end visibility, analytics, and automation — significantly slowing enterprise digital transformation.
Conversely, SD-WAN is a cloud-delivered service that streamlines deployment, unites management, and improves user/application experience — requiring significantly less spend than costly private WAN links.
And tasks that were previously
labor-intensive —
including automated network optimization, event correlation and active
remediation — can
now be managed without any need for manual intervention.
VMware SD-WAN™ greatly streamlines IT operations. Here’s five ways VMware SD-WAN helps IT teams take their efficiency to the next level and ensure network-wide connectivity:
1. Streamlined operations
Using a policy-based
solution, VMware SD-WAN ensures the network satisfies enterprise business needs
by specifying application definition parameters and resource usage.
Additionally, the
solution reduces the team’s load by providing zero-touch provisioning for
automatic authentication and configuration — ensuring secure branch connectivity and rapid onboarding of
new locations.
2. Agility
To enhance service
network agility, VMware SD-WAN separates the management plane, control plane,
and data plane, enabling the intelligence in the data plane to be moved to a
programmable control plane.
The management plane simplifies the team’s daily operations, creating a flexible architecture that meets the requirements of modern SASE implementations.
3. Transport
independence
Functioning
independently of any underlying transport system (e.g. MPLS, broadband
Internet, 4G/5G, etc.), VMware SD-WAN can be used by enterprises in concert
with their current WAN infrastructure, public Internet connections, commodity
broadband links, or any combination of these or other systems (e.g. LTE, 5G,
Wi-Fi.).
To deliver
peak performance and secure connectivity, the solution identifies the correct
paths for each application, enabling IT teams with more control to accurately
mix link expense and performance parameters.
4. Enhancing application performance
Regardless of
employee location or network updates, VMware SD-WAN ensures optimal performance
and availability of applications, which helps simplify IT team efforts.
Leveraging dynamic,
intelligent link steering, the solution helps IT teams automatically direct
traffic based on app requirements and business policies.
Incorporating data that
reports on link capacity, latency and quality, sessions can be redirected in
real time, eliminating data loss for sensitive applications, such as voice and
video. To spur data transfer, high bandwidth sessions can leverage link
aggregation.
5. Network optimization
and self-healing architecture
Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) uses AI/ML (artificial intelligence/machine learning) to minimize IT teams’ day-to-day workload. AIOps collects data directly from the infrastructure, analyzes it using AI/ML to automate actions, and recommends preventive and predictive maintenance tasks.
It also provides
fault detection, isolation, and remediation to manage application issues caused
by network services, security services, and applications.
Additionally, AI/ML
executes near real-time monitoring of user performance, performs dynamic
adaptation of network policies using self-healing and self-optimization, and
constantly tracks security threats monitoring with real-time data streams.
