RoundtableUC&C24 Mar 2017 · 3 min read

SD-WAN versus MPLS: Is it all win win?

You may have heard about the SD-WAN boom, is the technology as good as the they say? Why is the market poised for significant growth? Join our LIVE DEBATE

Rebekah Carter

Enterprises, business, and organisations across the world are finally beginning to recognise the benefits of the cloud. As innovative global collaboration solutions become more available, and remote working emerges as an essential part of the modern business marketplace, the cloud is revolutionising everything we do in business, from how we listen to music, to how we use our home thermostats.

SD-WAN, otherwise known as "Software-Defined Wide Area Network" is the most recent innovation to integrate with business proceedings and introduce the benefits of the cloud. Not just another acronym in the tech world, SD-WAN is only deployed by around 1% of businesses today, but marketing research firm Gartner predicts that by the end of 2019, 30% of all enterprises will be using SD-WAN.

What is SD-WAN?

With beginnings in "WAN" optimisation - a technology focused on accumulating a better understanding of private WAN connections, then optimising them for recurring patterns of traffic, SD-WAN dynamically selects the most cost-effective assortment of private links and public Internet connections. It works by giving network managers the chance to combine and configure different connections to behave just like a network, through path selection and traffic engineering.

With SD-WAN, applications are not at the mercy of standard bandwidth, but instead, the connection that's most applicable to each app is selected. It's clear to see why this solution is threatening the traditional MPLS WANs out there, but let's take a slightly closer look at the benefits of SD-WAN solutions.

SD-WAN Is Secure

Those using MPLS WANs have often pointed to the unmatched security it provides, but revelations from Edward Snowden, former CIA operative have put a serious dent in this argument. The ease with which the government could monitor networks quickly drew focus to the fact that other agencies could potentially do the same. SD-WAN can be secured using IPsec, which works through the validation and encryption of each packet of information in a communication session. This means that SD-WAN is at least as secure as MPLS.

SD-WAN offers Great Service Quality

SD-WAN provides fantastic service quality by accommodating various application requirements. It recognises the applications central to a specific project and provides them with the necessary bandwidth. Through the aggregation of connections, dynamic path selection allows for applications to work faster, providing better overall performance.

Additionally, SD-WANs can cache and store recent information, meaning that speed gets improved by the information that's already sitting in the network.

SD-WAN is Simple and Resilient

Thanks to the various delivery paths that apps can travel through, outages in SD-WAN solutions are mitigated by simply switching to an alternative link. This means that network downtime is significantly reduced. What's more, GUIs are standard with SD-WANs, which means that networks can be configured and controlled using icons instead of complex text. Appliances can be configured based on requirements, reducing the obstacles often presented by basic hardware.

On top of that, SD-WAN solutions are cheaper too. MPLS circuits are expensive to install and costly to scale, particularly when you take bandwidth into consideration. However, SD-WANs can give companies the chance to access better connectivity and lower costs by transferring traffic flows into the internet and public broadband.

SD-WAN versus MPLS

The chances are that MPLS circuits aren't going to become redundant just yet - many businesses simply don't feel the need to switch any time soon. However, one thing that is for certain is that SD-WANs aren't just a passing fad. While it might take some time to totally overcome MPLS as an industry standard, SD-WANs still represent a new solution in the world of networking.