Telstra adds Software Defined Wide Area Network to its portfolio of dynamic network offerings

Wednesday 4 May 2016 – Telstra today launched its new Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) service, a fully managed solution underpinned by Cisco’s Intelligent WAN (IWAN) technology.

According to Jim Clarke, Head of International Marketing, Products and Pricing, Telstra, the new global service allows businesses to increase efficiencies and reduce costs by easily and securely routing application traffic along the best available path and transport option, allowing networks to be tuned for peak performance in order to meet business priorities.

“The proliferation of media-rich applications and the increased number of connected devices is causing huge demand for bandwidth across wide area networks. Hybrid services such as Telstra’s SD-WAN offering allow traffic to be routed based on the application profile over multiple networks including private MPLS and the public internet.

“This gives organisations greater flexibility to deal with increased traffic and means their WAN’s can be more cost effective, without compromising on application performance or availability. Most importantly, it ensures that any traffic routed over the public internet remains highly secure incorporating VPN, firewall and network segmentation features,” he said.

The new SD-WAN service combines Telstra’s global network with Cisco technology to provide customers with an end-to-end solution that can be deployed and managed consistently across the world, and monitored via its customer portal.

“Global enterprises can now respond to business demands faster and more efficiently without having to worry about inconsistencies across their network. This new service also complements our other dynamic network solutions – including PEN Platform, Internet VPN, Data Centre Interconnect and Cloud Gateway Protection – and brings us a step closer to our vision of providing dynamic networks for complete customer control,” he said.

Jeff Reed, Senior Vice President, Cisco Enterprise Infrastructure and Solutions Group, added, “Enterprises need an open, software-driven architecture to accelerate their digital transformation.  Powered by Cisco’s IWAN solution, Telstra’s new SD-WAN suite gives enterprises the intelligence to innovate faster, reduce costs and lower risk. We are thrilled to enable this market leading solution to customers in Asia.”