Enterprises look to SD-WAN to manage cloud challenges
Enterprises are shifting their data center strategies towards a mix of different clouds to support their applications and workloads, and they are also moving towards as-a-service models for software and infrastructure.
These trends show that there is a dramatic change in how data moves through an enterprise – it's no longer funnelled through the traditional corporate data center.
One study predicts that by 2020, more than 80% of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud – more than 40% will run on public cloud platforms, according to LogicMonitor.
As enterprises move to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications from leading providers like Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, they will be faced with the challenge of ensuring speed and agility without sacrificing security, performance and reliability.
According to Silver Peak, self-driving wide area network (SD-WAN) will be a critical part of enterprise agility. Traditional WAN was not built for the cloud era. In contrast, a business-driven SD-WAN platform supports cloud consumption.
The right SD-WAN platform will be able to define application policies based on business intent – and without compromise on security, performance or speed.
Silver Peak describes some of the practical benefits that SD-WAN can deliver for security and performance:
"If the application is hosted in the cloud and is trusted, a business-driven SD-WAN can automatically connect users to it without backhauling traffic to a POP or HQ data center."
"Now, in general this traffic is usually going across an internet link which, on its own, may not be secure. However, the right SD-WAN platform will have a unified stateful firewall built-in for local internet breakout allowing only branch-initiated sessions to enter the branch and providing the ability to service chain traffic to a cloud-based security service if necessary, before forwarding it to its final destination."
"If the application is moved and becomes hosted by another provider or perhaps back to a company's own data center, traffic must be intelligently redirected, wherever the application is being hosted. Without automation and embedded machine learning, dynamic and intelligent traffic steering is impossible.
Silver Peak delivers the true transformational promise of the cloud with its business-first networking
model. The company has the proven ability to improve customer responsiveness, increase application performance, and significantly reduce capital and operational expenses by up to 90%.
Silver Peak's EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform is built for today's cloud-first enterprise, enabling enterprises to reduce the cost and complexity of building a WAN.
Unity EdgeConnect comprises three elements:
- Unity EdgeConnect physical or virtual appliances deployed in branch offices to create a secure, virtual network overlay
- Unity Orchestrator: Included with EdgeConnect, this provides visibility into cloud and legacy applications, we well as the ability to centrally assign policies based on business intent
- Unity Boost: This optional WAN optimisation tool performance pack combines Silver Peak WAN optimisation technologies with EdgeConnect to create a single,
unified WAN edge platform.
EdgeConnect delivers consistent deployment from branch to cloud, multi-cloud flexibility, and investment protection. These EdgeConnect features and components empower enterprises to shift to a business-first networking model, and away from router-centric and basic SD-WAN solutions.
IT decision makers may say that they need to see it before they believe it, which is why Silver Peak is offering an interactive demo of its EdgeConnect solution. The demo walks you through the basics of SD-WAN through videos, FAQs, guides and wizards.
