Getting the most out of a WAN is important to enterprises. The faster packets can be pushed from one endpoint to another, the better. Throughput and latency are two of the most important metrics tracked by IT teams the world over, and for good reason: if the WAN isn’t performing optimally, neither are users.
This has made WAN optimization an important topic in the world of enterprise WAN for some time. With legacy WAN solutions like MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching), WAN optimization often entailed deploying and maintaining a large number of complex and expensive appliances. This in turn led to more complexity in workflows and additional opex to go along with the significant capex investment. Fortunately, premium SDWaaS providers have found a way to help “collapse the stack” of appliances previously required for WAN optimization and not only reduce the capex, but also reduce the opex and streamline the associated workflows.
In this piece, we’ll explore the advantages of minimizing the number of appliances deployed on your WAN by using premium SDWaaS.
Reduced capex
The legacy approach to enterprise WAN required enterprises to create a “stack” of appliances in an attempt to achieve security and performance optimization. One appliance may be used for networking, another for security, and yet another to help optimize WAN performance (often an attempt to work around the trombone routing problem inherent to MPLS). This stack of appliances at each branch location wasn’t cheap, and therefore “unstacking” the branch can help significantly reduce capex.
Reduced complexity & more efficient operations
While the capex argument for unstacking the branch is somewhat compelling, the real benefits begin to become clear when you consider the operational benefits. The more appliances you deploy, the more appliances IT has to learn, and the more difficult it becomes for them to effectively provision and maintain the infrastructure. This means more time or even more staff are required and workflows related to maintaining the WAN become more difficult and time consuming. Further, when something breaks, troubleshooting is inherently more complex and IT staff less familiar with a given device when there are multiple appliances to look at as opposed to one.
This leads to the obvious question: why not just outsource the servicing and maintenance of the appliances to an MSP (Managed Service Provider)? While there are certainly benefits to MSPs in some instances, in the case of WAN optimization with multiple WAN appliances, this usually means that either you or the MSP will have to deal with multiple support teams and vendors in order to adequately maintain the infrastructure. This inherently increased complexity in vendor management and reduces mean time to resolution in the event something goes wrong.
The SDWaaS approach inherently streamlines all the issues mentioned above by packaging the entire suite of WAN technology required into a single appliance. This reduces operational complexity and streamlines vendor management. In turn, enterprises are able to use less IT staff to support comparably sized WANs, streamline vendor management, and waste less time with support tickets and change management requests. In short, because it integrates security, networking, and HA (high availability) into one holistic WAN platform, SDWaaS enables a thinner and more efficient approach to appliance deployment than legacy WAN solutions can.
Enhanced security
One of the often overlooked impacts of increased complexity is the impact it can have on security. Complexity not only makes it more difficult to know how to configure a given device, it also means additional testing and planning is required to ensure a given security configuration does not conflict with a setting somewhere else. Additionally, IT teams become hesitant to push patches when they are dealing with complex appliance stacks they are unfamiliar with. Even if a given patch is a security patch, the idea that pushing it may break the WAN can lead to hesitance or aversion to deploying the latest security updates. By streamlining the appliance stack down to one appliance, IT security can be made simpler, and therefore more effective.
Addressing the single point of failure counterargument
A common counterargument against the single appliance approach to SDWaaS is that it introduces a single point of failure into a WAN. While this is technically true, when comparing it to the stack of appliances often used with MPLS, it is not a relevant point. This is because stacking appliances that achieve different functionalities (security, networking, WAN optimization, etc.) into a single chain does not eliminate single points of failure, it simply adds more of them.
SDWaaS optimizes WAN optimization
As we have seen, by condensing the features of multiple WAN appliances into one holistic high-performance on-premises appliance, SDWaaS enables enterprises to more efficiently and affordably achieve their WAN optimization goals.
