What is SD-WAN & How SD-WAN Involves Cloud Environments?

The software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is a virtual WAN architecture that allows companies to securely connect users to applications that use any combination of transport services such as MPLS, LTE and Internet services.

The sd-wan vendors use a centralized control function to route traffic safely and intelligently through the WAN. This improves application performance, improves user experience, increases business productivity and reduces IT costs.

How SD-WAN Involves Cloud Environments

While security and traditional WAN cost reductions are driving the adoption of SD-WAN, the need to quickly and securely link cloud services is also an important motivating factor.

According to, many trends drive the greater use of SD-WAN technology, the main one being the greater use of containers and cloud-based applications that require access from the edge. "The range of customers that require SD-WAN service access to data centers or resources in the cloud is multiplying and changing.

According to Anderson, customers are increasingly looking for SD-WAN technology that connects data centers with cloud resources. "SD-WAN technology has evolved significantly in the last two years, so you can easily increase resources and do it quickly and economically."

A critical approach is to create data source liquidity between local and public clouds. As companies continue to expand their private data centers while increasing the adoption of public cloud services, Kip Compton, senior vice president of the Cisco cloud solutions and platform group, wrote a blog earlier this year.

"They will be able to innovate, implement, and manage applications easily and safely at an accelerated pace by building common management and policy-based governance in multi-cloud environments" said Compton. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2018, by 2021, 94% of workloads and computing instances will be processed in the cloud data center, and 6% will be processed in the traditional data center.

In fact, most major sd-wan vendors, including Cisco, VMware, and others, have partnered with cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to help optimize SD-WAN traffic to some extent.

Benefits of SD-WAN

• SD-WAN offers many assistances for companies of all sizes and is ideal for organizations with multiple positions that need to provide secure, reliable, and adaptable connectivity from site to location.
• SD-WAN not only reduces costs but also uses cloud-based applications to provide enterprise-class WAN connectivity that is simple, secure, and agile for businesses with distributed branches.
• The most significant advantage of SD-WAN is that organizations can focus on the business objectives of IT. All this is done without the need for on-site IT support by seamlessly connecting remote branch locations to the private network in a more straightforward, faster, and more cost-effective way than traditional WANs.
• The advantage of SD-WAN is that it creates a secure global network connection that is always active and provides all the software as a SaaS that it uses to ensure the security your company needs within the existing Internet. Service) is to trust the application today and tomorrow. Unlike traditional MPLS solutions, SD-WAN provides end-to-end encryption of data in transit as standard, which makes it inherently more secure.