5 things enterprises need to do before implementing SD-WAN

1.     Make sure the infrastructure is ready. For some companies this might mean
upgrading the hardware, and for some software, but for most it’s probably both.
It’s important here to think “end to end” and ensure that all the
infrastructure components are “SD-WAN ready” before deployment. If the goal is
to migrate to an SD-WAN, then make sure the infrastructure is 100% ready to go
before the project is started.

2.     Do an application audit. To make the most of the SD-WAN
deployment, businesses needs to have a sound understanding of what applications
traverse the WAN and what traffic patterns are like. It’s also important to
know what dependencies the applications have, which ones are subject to what
types of network issues — like packet loss, jitter, or delay — and how much
bandwidth they consume. Also, if a hybrid WAN is being used, network managers
must understand which applications must run over MPLS and which ones can run on
broadband without a significant drop in performance. An application audit can
answer all these questions and can help organizations build an application
strategy. Without it, the impact of an SD-WAN will be minimal.

3.     Change the organizational structure. In most companies, the network,
application, and compute teams work independently and interact very little with
the other groups. This has never been ideal but was sufficient in a legacy IT
world. With SDNs, these IT sub-departments need to work together and be tightly
integrated. Applications and compute infrastructure are highly dependent on the
network today, meaning there will be a significant amount of cross-group
collaboration required to ensure user productivity is not impacted.

4.     Rethink IT security. Securing a legacy network
certainly isn’t easy, but it’s straightforward as there are a minimal number of
ingress/egress points and attack surfaces. With an SD-WAN, traffic patterns
change, branch offices have direct Internet access and the number of attack
surfaces grows. Traditional perimeter security tools are no longer effective in
a software-defined world. It’s important to re-think security strategy and
implement products that are continuously gathering network data, analyzing it
and looking for anomalies. This will enable security to become more proactive
versus reactive.

5.     Evolve the skills of network operations. Even if the infrastructure is
ready and the applications have been studied, the business needs a network
operations team that can support it. Managing virtual workloads, network
architectures, orchestrating services and analyzing data requires significantly
different skills than managing routers. If the organization doesn’t have the
internal skills, consider using a managed service as a way of bridging the gap.