Comprehensive Comparisons of Traditional WANs and SD-WANs

The main purpose of optimizing WAN is making sure that the branch office and other business enterprise locations are able to operate easily and quickly. The optimization also allows efficiency with virtualization and cloud. Comparing to a traditional WAN distribution, SD-WAN technology allows enterprises to distribute their WAN services a hundred times faster than the traditional WAN with thrice the cost-savings.

In the following paragraphs, you will get to learn and understand the comparisons of Traditional WANs and SD-WANs.

Understanding the Traditional WAN or Traditional Wide Area Network

The traditional WAN or traditional wide area network is broken. The stability tends to be unsteady and unreliable. It is designed based on various devices that are stacked or piled in the branch office with isolated management system structure, and separate wide area network or WAN links that are connecting them. The essential factors of the Traditional WAN are listed below.

• The bandwidth is expensive and limited.

The traditional WAN connections and protocols such as the MPLS and private circuits have restricted bandwidth and overly expensive. These specific network connection links impede the rollout and innovation of new application services and greatly impacts the overall performance of applications. In addition, these private WAN like MPLS wide area network’s superfluous is complex to distribute and manage.

• Traditional WAN is dependent on the data center.

This traditional wide area network has no access to cloud resources, which is already the common and the latest software application service. The traffic on the network is solely dependent on the data center.

• The performance of the application traffic is unpredictable or uncertain.

The application traffic over the web links lacks effective SLAs to be able to predict performance. So, every change in the service application quality must be done manually throughout the branches and the data center.

• The traditional WAN has a complex structural design.

This particular WAN service entails a lot of single-function devices, and equipment that are connected through various WAN links. The interlinking of webs or collection of endless networks makes this network difficult for the branch of IT management.

Proficiency and Reliability of SD-WAN or Software-Designed WAN

The SD-WAN is designed in a way that allows the branch of networks better. Furthermore, this wide area network has a software-centric approach. This means that the SD-WAN technology solution is capable of being deployed on cost-effective platforms or virtually on concurrent router and server platforms. Below is a list of the great advantages of SD-WAN compared to Traditional WAN.

• It delivers a network overlay with multiple links from various service providers to create a unified pool of bandwidth service. It offers a top-class performance and high availability for applications that are entirely independent of the underlying distribution links.
• The network is highly optimized for the cloud applications.
• SD-WAN technology solution makes the network structural design simple.
• This wide area network promulgates cost efficiency as it allows a pay-as-you-grow scheme.