The shape and face of workspaces is changing every day, owing to the dynamic nature and pace of technology. From desktops that provided limited movement and access, to laptops and smartphones that fit in your bag, technology is steadily becoming more powerful, producing and delivering intelligent functioning.
With security concerns plaguing businesses across industries, entities are actively looking at a cloud-first strategy to avail heightened security for their data. With this shift, a switch to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), has seen an incline in its adoption. Research firm Gartner predicts, that SaaS is expected to be the biggest cloud market globally, reaching $75 billion by 2020. Closer home, India’s SaaS business has been registering 33 per cent YoY growth in 2017. This development has stirred a movement of IT environments to a hybrid or multi-cloud set-up. With the current market stimulus, businesses need to look at investing time into safely migrating data and applications into these multi-cloud environments and cushioning it with the requisite bandwidth. Measures also need to be taken to have a contingency plan for high availability and redundancy, to prevent expensive and interruptive outages and downtime.
Driven by the intent of securing their multi-cloud strategy to maximize productivity and overall output, organizations are actively looking at SD-WAN to improve the fabric and meet the requirements of multi-cloud. SD-WAN allows for creation of a virtual WAN path that comprises of any type of physical circuit an organization uses to connect to the internet. The virtual path then links the organization’s branch office to a specific cloud computing platform and facilitates a reliable, performant and secure connection across the internet.
In this backdrop, SD-WAN’s growth has seen widespread acceptance as a capable base for a multi-cloud strategy. Additionally, with its offering of multi-layered security and end-to-end encryption, data protection is supported by an integrated firewall at every stage between source and destination. This delivery has led to strengthening of SD-WAN’s proposition as an important layer in an organization’s multi-cloud approach. Having said that, combination of the two is highly advocated owing to a number of benefits it aids.
Trust quotient
Outages are highly unpredictable and easily disrupt single network links, causing connections to fail when most crucial. This comes as a bad news for businesses that want to move more operation load onto cloud. SD-WAN addresses this by creating reliable connections to cloud providers directly from the branch office or data center.
Experience delivered
Many legacy networks lack the design to cope with diverse network set-ups used by businesses today. Resultant – packet loss, increased jitter and latency, leading to an unsatisfactory experience for the user. SD-WAN, in this case, makes smarter decisions about distributing and directing traffic across, and manages all the points where the network is running through a single pane of control. It also carefully analyzes and chooses the best path to steer traffic in to deliver a convenient and ultra-efficient experience.
Level of efficiency and security
SD-WAN is designed to prioritize network efficiency. By simplifying the network, the technology significantly cuts cost of connections. Regardless of whether a business is considering connecting branch offices, cloud providers, or on premise data centers, SD-WAN is competent to handle it all seamlessly. Because security is a pressing issue affecting businesses that want to or are in the process of moving their data onto cloud, the deployment of SD-WAN helps segregate data based on application or source. Further, it also restricts access to SaaS applications for certain groups of users.
As cloud aggressively expands to every nook and corner of a workspace’s build, the opportunity of increased local efficiency and visibility, when required, is hard to miss. Coupled with SD-WAN, the duo can construct a new security perimeter for the cloud age. For that reason, SD-WAN is steadily establishing itself as a pre-requisite for an IT environment that is privy to digital transformation, cloud sprawl, aggressive cybersecurity attacks, and a new era of integrated communications-as-a-service. And given the number of positives available, businesses are increasingly adopting the disruptive pair to build their own fortress of intelligently automated networks.
— By Ravindra Kelkar, Senior Director, Enterprise & Public Sector, Citrix India.
