“WAN acceleration is helping businesses improve efficiency and speed.

To some, Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) are a revolution, providing the ability to identify the nature of data flows, prioritise them and deliver homogeneity of performance. This permits IT departments to deploy them “seamlessly between the decentralisation and globalisation of its enterprise footprint and its desire to have traffic managed through a central monitoring setup”, says Todd Kiehn, VP of Product Management GTT. He states this in his IT Pro Portal article, ‘The impact of SD-WAN adoption on digital transformation and corporate strategy’.

One management interface

SD-WANs can also be orchestrated through one management interface – perhaps similarly to legacy Wide Area Networks (WANs), which were easy to administer and orchestrate. He adds: “The SD-WAN layer, while providing agility, efficiency and better performance, also brings some complexity, requiring new skills for the teams responsible for operating the network”. However, he comments that the security of data streams and the direct access to services in the cloud from remote sites often require a change in network architecture, mesh and route selection.”

The article: Digital transformation and corporate strategy: The impact of SD-WANs and WAN data acceleration