Cisco SD-WAN Overview Course

MPLS Vs SD-WAN

SD-WAN evolved from MPLS technology, which has powered private connectivity for more than two decades. In many ways, SD-WAN can be seen as a software abstraction of MPLS technology that's applicable to wider scenarios: It brings secure, private connectivity that's agnostic to all kinds of links and providers and is cloud-aware. While MPLS handled failure scenarios with backup links, SD-WAN handles them with real-time traffic steering based on centralized policy. Also, since SD-WAN unifies the entire WAN backbone, it delivers comprehensive analytics across the network globally. This wasn't possible before, because of disparate pieces of infrastructure and policy.

The traditional WAN architecture was limited to enterprise, branch, and data centers. Once an organization adopts cloud-based applications in the form of SaaS and IaaS, its WAN architecture experiences an explosion of traffic accessing applications distributed across the globe.

These changes have multiple implications for IT. Employee productivity may be compromised by SaaS application performance problems. WAN expenses can rise with an inefficient use of dedicated and backup circuits. IT fights a daily, complex battle of connecting multiple types of users with multiple types of devices to multiple cloud environments.

With SD-WAN, IT can deliver routing, threat protection, efficient offloading of expensive circuits, and simplification of WAN network management.

Traditional WANs pass traffic in the clear, a luxury the New WAN cannot afford. With mounting cyber threats, securing traffic in transit is no longer an option. It is a requirement.

Many WAN monitoring tools, fail to differentiate between business-critical Internet applications and general Internet browsing. With so many applications and many different kinds of users, insight into WAN is more critical than ever.

The WANs of old presumed on-site personnel to configure and adapt the network. The on-demand business of today is lean and mean with little tolerance for complex configuration and installation. Do you want to fly an engineer out to set up a new office? Probably not.