Enterprise SD-WAN accelerates migration to Cloud
The IT organization conducted extensive research to understand all their options, and tested multiple products in their lab. One of the success criteria for the SaaS/cloud application migration was the four-nines availability of critical services, while reducing cost of service delivery. The enterprise SD-WAN was selected after rigorous research and testing.
The platform included enterprise grade routing stack, full featured SD-WAN and advanced security. The routing stack provided simple integration with the existing underlay network. The SD-WAN function enabled IT to implement policy-based traffic steering. The advanced security with NGFW, IPS/IDS, AV and other state of the art security allowed secure local breakouts. The platform, extensible with REST APIs, allowed the company to begin the process, and integrate their applications, cloud resources and connectivity into the enterprise SD-WAN architecture.
The first phase involved moving the company’s network access layer into the SD-WAN fabric, which meant switching to SD-WAN appliance in each branch office location, and connecting them to the SD-WAN fabric. The firm has completed approximately 90% of its onpremises site deployments. The second phase will bring their virtual private clouds into the SD-WAN fabric. The company already has all of their cloud-based controllers inside AWS, with a virtual data center spun up as a branch. One business requirement is to ensure performance of voice and video traffic is of high quality, especially with the company’s transition from MPLS to Internet circuits. With integrated capabilities such as dynamic traffic conditioning and path resiliency features, the enterprise SD-WAN architecture can easily overcome the limitations that are characteristic of Internet circuits.
Before the migration, due to high cost of MPLS, critical sites such as Data Center and support centers had active-passive circuits while the less critical sites such as branches were connected with a single link. After deploying SD-WAN, all locations now have multiple active-active links resulting in higher availability and capacity.
Full stack routing, and enhanced configuration and centralized management has allowed the company to easily migrate legacy sites to the SD-WAN fabric in phases. In fact, outside of pre- and post-testing, the company is able to migrate a branch office in less than an hour.
The SD-WAN fabric has allowed the firm to move from MPLS to multiple lower cost Internet circuits, enabling the company to meet the cost reduction objective. With the enterprise SD-WAN architecture, the organization’s operating cost per site is reduce to just over half the previous average annual spend.
The enterprise SD-WAN architecture has given the firm high availability with multiple circuits, increased bandwidth while managing cost, local Internet connectivity with improved performance, enhanced security at all sites and, multi-cloud connectivity for business applications, resulting in higher quality of user experience.
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For more information about enterprise SD-WAN solution, please visit riverbed.com/enterprise-sdwan.