By IDG Research Services

Much of IT infrastructure has been virtualized and software-defined. But networking has for the most part lagged behind. Read the whitepaper.

Many enterprises are eager to unshackle themselves from legacy wide-area network technology such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). New software-defined solutions such as SD-WAN eliminate the costs and time-consuming effort needed to upgrade legacy networking hardware.

Legacy network architectures were designed for a data center-centric world where traffic was primarily routed from hub to hub and then distributed over internal LANs. Not only is that a rigid, hard-to-modify construct, but it’s also costly to provision, upgrade and repurpose. SD-WAN provides a more attractive pricing model, along with a lot more.

“What makes [SD-WAN] appealing to enterprises is that it offers open hardware platforms and standardized network links that can reduce prices for WAN,” according to SdxCentral.

But there’s a lot more to SD-WAN that will appeal to the enterprise. “Cost savings are certainly a good reason to investigate migrating to an SD-WAN, but very quickly businesses will realize it will also offer higher uptime, better application performance, and for network operations to work much faster,” writes Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research.

That’s increasingly important in the cloud era; applications can live virtually anywhere and, at least in theory, be moved or shared among various cloud service providers. Businesses will want greater control and visibility into what is going on with their applications across all business locations.

Meeting the performance, availability and flexibility requirements of today’s cloud-centric business applications requires software-defined networking solutions that are quick and easy to deploy like SD-WAN, and cost-efficient, high-speed broadband.

To learn more, read this whitepaper: SD-WAN: Satisfying Application Performance Needs