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For decades, business-critical applications have resided in data centers – and for good reason: IT had operational control for management, scale, and security. With the proliferation of cloud services as a viable alternative to on-premises computing, the location of applications has taken a dramatic shift. 451 Research cites that 70% of enterprises are utilizing SaaS applications and that more than 32% are using a form of private cloud, IaaS, or PaaS.
As organizations migrate their application workloads to the cloud, the network needs to undergo a shift to align with this new paradigm. This means extending into public cloud environments, which could be any combination of IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. Further, organizations are leveraging the best of both worlds: data center connectivity combined with cloud connectivity in the form of hybrid cloud.
This is where SD-WAN can help. A software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is defined as a virtual WAN architecture in which the control of network connections, application flows, policies, security mechanisms and general administration is separated from the underlying hardware. Everything is managed via software on centralized consoles instead of at each physical location on individual edge devices and infrastructures.