Connectivity - the new business lifeline, SD-WAN - the new pulse-check

Securing the Distributed Enterprise with SD-WAN – what are the main reasons and considerations you should be thinking of…

Digital transformation was almost a cliché some years back. In the last two years though, the pandemic has forced every enterprise—small or big—to undergo digital transformation. Now it’s time to talk of ‘complete’ digital transformation, as Sunil Rajguru, Editor Dataquest and PCQuest rightly put forth as he unlocked an interesting discussion at a webinar on ‘Securing The Distributed Enterprise’.

As the moderator, Rajguru sketched a perfect backdrop to get into the finer strokes of the distributed enterprise. “The world has changed forever, and we are entering a phase of consolidation. These are times of Tech-celeration. Now it’s time to leave ad-hoc strategies and go for long-term strategies. The world we are living in has changed. We have entered the era of connected global networks. Now there is no such thing as ‘offline’. When it comes to business, everything is ‘online’. This new world of Cloud and networked world has to be simple, flexible and economical. We need a secure and high bandwidth environment.”

Mohit Chandra Saxena, CTO, Infinity Labs picked up two main colours to paint the picture that should emerge next. SD-WAN and SDN.

Meet SD-WAN, Say Hi to Agility

Averring with Rajguru’s view of the new world, he emphasised how connectivity has, indeed, become a major lifeline. “The pandemic has truly taught us the importance of reliable and secure connectivity. Security has become a challenge with new attacks, malware, and more vulnerabilities around. Mobility is an important factor for business – hence, the ability to have remote capabilities is a ‘normal’ now. So is the presence of ‘multi-cloud strategy’.  Reliability and security have become paramount.”

He explained how – in the light of these new realities- network transformation should have capabilities like support of real-time data exchange, support for hybrid cloud infrastructure, full secure WAN infrastructure and connectivity, higher uptime and resilience, the ability to prioritise critical business apps, and optimized WAN infra costing.

Saxena also zoomed in on some WAN challenges. “The main challenges with traditional WAN are about limited application visibility, manual management, fragmented security, manageability of decentralized networks, sub-optimal bandwidth utilization, no-app-based routing wherein routing is not intelligent enough to adapt itself to the application in question.”

So, let’s jump in to what SDN and SD-WAN can do here.

“The main aspect of SDN is to separate data plane from the control plane. This helps to reduce overload on data processing areas. When we apply this SDN concept on WAN, we get SD-WAN. It gives central control in the WAN space. Traditional networks have routers with packet-processing engines and configurations on top of them. Then there is a reporting and management engine. You end up using a lot of manual exercise to make these routers work-because they do not have auto-configurations. It needs a lot of human effort and multiple set of software to keep the network up. But in an SDN-based network, there is an infrastructure part which has the data plane, then there is the application layer and control layer under the control plane. There is an overlay network that is intelligent enough to give a single pane of glass for management and choice of transport. It can also prioritise applications. You can have good SLAs for critical applications.”

With SD-WAN we get a lot of outcomes that were not possible before. “Like on latency, and performance. If we look at traditional WAN—those systems were rigid, decentralized in management and control with multiple consoles, had high OpEx, suffered lower bandwidth utilization due to low visibility and fragmented security. They also wrestled with issues like ISP dependency for any change required.”

Tick these Boxes as you move ahead

He then gave a peek into InfiNxt solution. “We have developed an architecture where CPE only exchange the customer data with each other—and do not send it to cloud etc. There is a configuration engine, analytics engine, an API engine as well as lightweight, small-form factor hardware with very less power consumption. The hardware is robust, with no moving parts, with a high shelf life, and can survive Indian climate conditions very well.”

He also shared how the solution becomes distinct with mobile-based deployment, a user-friendly controller that gives a single pane of glass to manage everything. The network becomes transport-agnostic. There is automation in policy creation, auto VPN etc. “We have application prioritisation, real-time visibility through streaming telemetry, scalability, interoperability with API integration, role-based administration, and performance via application-aware routing. We support rest API through which we can integrate any third-party solution to SD-WAN.”

He gave a glimpse of use-cases that the company has covered so far—like traffic segmentation, app-aware routing, live streaming of key KPIs, bundled centralized controller etc. “We have seen this reduce expenses on highly skilled CLI resources as SD-WAN is GUI-based. We also saw how backhaul traffic was secured with lightweight auto-established tunnels. We have also seen cost-reduction with ZTP activation.” He also shared the pride of bringing in a Make in India solution. “As Indians, we should spend on products in India, for the country. And be proud of solutions made here.”

It’s Time to Get Ready for the Future

The discussion also covered some challenges with SD-WAN adoption. Like cost-concerns, skills’ availability, interoperability with existing WANs etc. 

Rajguru asked a pertinent question here. What are the immediate benefits and quick returns that can come from SD-WAN shifts? Saxena addressed this by sharing that there is ease of management, and no need of multiple skill sets to manage many routers. “Many appliances get out of support every 3-4 years. The technology-refresh pushes an enterprise to go for new hardware. With SD-WAN, just software patches can help. Plus, you are moving a step ahead in your journey of embracing a multi cloud environment. Feature-velocity as per customer needs – would be something that an enterprise should look at while evaluating SD-WAN.”

The advantage of general-purpose hardware cannot be ignored when thinking of SD-WAN. “This hardware can be used for hosting other applications as well. This is not possible with custom-built hardware. You only need to upgrade the hardware for high throughput needs- but not just for a technology change.” Plus, this really opens up new doors on the possibility of future-proofing one’s investments.

And the need to be future-proof, as Rajguru echoed, is a lesson that the pandemic has re-wired strongly in all of us.