As enterprises today adopt emerging business applications, many are finding that static, legacy WAN infrastructure and traffic management practices limit their value, and aren't well-suited to meet current connectivity and application performance demands. To tackle these challenges, network managers are looking for dynamic mechanisms to optimally use available WAN links for infrastructure resiliency and bandwidth amplification.
The management of these new, complex IT environments requires a transformation of network architectures with software-defined WAN technology (SD-WAN). This gives way to a secure and flexible WAN infrastructure that guarantees business continuity, supports growth and embraces new key applications and devices, while reducing bandwidth total cost of ownership (TCO).
Enterprises are so intrigued by the promise of SD-WAN that Cisco recently created a ‘Bill of Rights', outlining best practices around the technology's adoption.
Many of the rights listed reflect the principles of InfoVista's Autonomic Network System™ (ANS). The only system to deliver fully automated application visibility, application control, WAN optimization and dynamic WAN selection over an enterprise's global network, ANS embodies these rights and priorities, including:
- Monitoring, tuning and reducing human intervention: ANS's core properties are self-learning, self-configuring and self-optimizing.
- Regulating bandwidth locally, while steering traffic globally: Organizations should have the ability to apply bandwidth allocation at a micro level, while still preserving the global view of the network traffic and being able to select the correct WAN connection (e.g. MPLS, broadband Internet, 3G/4G, etc.) in real time.
- Security, interoperability and flexibility of service delivery: The right to select new ways of deployment, including hybrid WAN, direct Internet, cloud and interoperability with other vendors, and network function virtualization (NFV), is a freedom all organizations deploying SD-WAN should have.
- The ability to scale: The room to grow allows most large enterprise networks to be successful. It is not a coincidence that our Ipanema architecture uses a central management platform called SALSA (Scalable Application Level Service Architecture).
Accessible to every enterprise, these rights can be easily related with SD-WAN frameworks. Network technology is also driving an IT environment evolution, which hybrid WAN and virtual WAN are also part of, so we should expect to see these rights extend to include them as well.
To learn more about InfoVista's views on SD-WAN, read our blog post on SD-WAN & Hybrid WAN Architectures: The Roles of Each in the Enterprise.
