Smooth SD-WAN migration – this is where everyone is moving!
“A Platform tailored for Business.”
SD-WAN is a cost-effective bespoke solution at the front of today’s network evolution. Letting businesses to manage the whole infrastructure from the Cloud and providing strict security to applications and services. Benefits organisations with agility and flexibility, at the same time, cutting-costs quite dramatically.
“Rewriting how WAN is delivered in the Cloud Era”
Why SD-WAN is a perfect solution for the Cloud?
Organisations leveraging branch office locations, IoT devices, and distributed network devices face a unique set of considerations as they migrate to the Cloud. Many older (WAN) solutions rely on backhauling branch office traffic to the data centre, subsequently exhausting network bandwidth, which reflects in poor application performance. Further, these solutions are generally rigid, complex to configure, and expensive to maintain requiring significant manual network configuration to integrate them with cloud environments properly.
It provides flexibility on network options: Internet Broadband, MPLS and LTE.
Measure twice, cut once
A good design is needed to save hassle and unnecessary expenses later. Below Core points provide insight on where to concentrate your efforts and what is essential.
Analyse and Understand your network and applications to get SD-WAN ready
Some may think this is elementary, however very important to take full advantage of SD-WAN technology. How many and what type of applications are hosted in the Cloud. Traffic flows, latency, priorities – QoS. In a nutshell, how everything is put together and how SD-WAN will segregate those services connecting to the Cloud and Data Center, not forgetting Security aspect.
“Reduce complexity for Remote Sites”
Functional networks are Simple networks, and the same applies to SD-WAN.
The design must be foolproof. It needs to consider each application as if it had a single lane in the multi-lane motorway. Some of those lines need to have priority for VoIP and Video traffic. By separating those lanes, tight-security can be enforced. Sufficient bandwidth and resiliency are vital as traffic will flow to the Cloud, Data Center and other sites. Planning and execution must be impeccable.
How are you going to integrate SD-WAN within your environment?
Another question you need to ask yourself: Is your current infrastructure inline to accept an extension of your network – SD-WAN?
Knowing what application you have at branches or campus location, you can achieve higher performance enhancements by prioritising traffic/protocols. In SD-WAN, routing functions are performed in Control Plane – Cloud. Inevitably some of the traffic will need to be encrypted by the VPN to the central corporate location. At this stage also it is advisable to allocate enough IP addresses for Management and Data. Out-of-band and LTE connections need to be considered to support remote applications, services and network.
Research: is my SD-WAN compatible with my Cloud provider?
Connectivity to the Cloud will be an essential objective, if not the most important? The overall solution is where SD-WAN excels over MPLS, hence some testing may be required. Make sure that chosen SD-WAN hardware operates at pick performance with selected Clouds such as; AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. In some cases, some SD-WAN services provide only one option; central hub-style, or through local Internet. A key driver for SD-WAN adoption is the aggregation of different WAN connections, like broadband and LTE to minimise latency = delay.
It would be best if you balanced all the options, and chose the one is most suited to enjoy benefits that SD-WAN solution fully provides.
Applications, Services, End-users and Traffic Flow
We think the best approach is to implement the design regarding the application and the infrastructure. However, that may be very academic in some scenarios. Therefore it is essential to monitor the behaviour of the application, traffic flows, routing, bandwidth and latency. Within a week, tweaks need to be applied to achieve much better performance. Even if you run the two precisely the same remote sites with the same services, the output may vary. Based on your finding within first month policies should be adjusted to provide an original path for the service and excellent end-user experience.
Perfect time to review and update you Security Policy, before migrating to SD-WAN
This is not an option. It has to be conducted in the design and testing phase, application and services security has to be tightened to the maximum. We all know that later this task will be precarious and skipped. Therefore take this opportunity, review your policy, use ONLY secure protocols, encryption, and make it bulletproof. You have opportunity, almost ideal situation; you can migrate application by application and test it extensively. Remember, SD-WAN also provides direct access to the Internet, which may bring some risks if the security policy isn’t deployed correctly.
“Next-Generation WAN built with a focus on Agility”
We would not deploy to a new client SD-WAN solution, without running Prove of Concept (PoC) first.
With SD-WAN, you are introducing a new model/concept. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to run PoC to discover any problems that can be identified and remediated. Additionally, any tweaks can be implemented to increase the performance and behaviour of applications; after that is plain sailing. It will be much simpler to roll it out throughout the organisation.
Where to start with the migration to SD-WAN?
Start the migration from the site that will cause the smallest impact on the environment. Please also remember about the applications, chose wisely to take full advantage of SD-WAN. Consider where the applications are hosted, how they are going to be integrated into the cloud gateways, secure connections to the Internet in the most cost-effective method. All the puzzles need to fit perfectly in SD-WAN to create the best access for these applications and end-users.
You cannot be blind during the deployment stage, so perform in-depth monitoring.
Even the most basic monitoring tools will give you an indication where you are going wrong, and whether there is an impact on the business. However, it would help if you went further and set up in-depth monitoring to verify and validate how the network is performing under stress. Check the High-Availability scenario with Active-Active connections, routing via the best-optimised bandwidth path for latency-sensitive applications. In many cases, small adjustment will be implemented to achieve the best performance.
Are you not done yet? No, please be pro-active and continuously monitor the network.
Network monitoring will give you an insight into SD-WAN and to the entire infrastructure. As mentioned before this is a new model that has to be nourished, adjusted in many areas; applications performance, network policies and business requirements.
“Optimised Cloud access,
Reliable application performance and high-availability,
Reduced WAN expenses”
10 SDWAN Features and Benefits that you should be applying
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Zero-Touch Deployment
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Encryption Key Rotation
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Multiplex VPN’s
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Application-Aware Routing
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Programmable API’s
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Fully Optimised Cloud Connectivity
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Insight Data Analytics
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End-to-End Application Microsegmentation
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All in One – Firewalls, NAT, IPS, Router
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Wireless Connectivity
Please check other blogs:
SDWAN, sophisticated, secure, resilient and easy to operate
By analysing your Data Network we can assist you and make you stronger!