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Focusing SD-WAN deployment

Editorial Type: Feature     Date: 11-2018    Views: 4503      







SD-WAN implementations can, despite the market hype, be difficult. Marc Sollars, Chief Technology Officer at Teneo consider some important planning and migration factors

Many top athletes will follow their coach's training regime and they can achieve stunning results, but sometimes, they can lose out in the final metres of their race. This may be because they lack crucial race experience, or were quietly elbowed out during the last few metres. Similarly, for CIOs and network infrastructure teams with clear outcomes in mind, the fine details can be challenging and the final migration costs difficult to control. Getting the IT team safely across the SD-WAN finishing line, especially with a complex migration, requires some effort and skill.

The technical capabilities of SD-WAN technology are so wide-ranging that integration specialists have over time developed start-to-finish approaches to implementations for customers' pilot projects and their subsequent deployments. These methodologies help to identify detailed business outcomes and assess suppliers making SD-WAN implementations more manageable. There are some important elements to consider.

Cost savings, or a new technology model: An SD-WAN expert should consider the customer's motivation for cost-saving and its implications for the desired technology solution. Is the business looking to salami-slice its legacy WAN costs or make incremental gains on supplier bandwidth KPIs? Or is SD-WAN a lifecycle event, creating an opportunity to ensure manageable monthly costs by using managed services or new, as-a-Service models? Or does the Board seek centralised control to enable global upscaling?

Business agility: An experienced technology partner should collaborate with the CIO and the networking team to understand their appetite for risk, any M&A activity and its attitude towards site turn-up and tear-down.

It is important that they study the IT team's policies on cloud (IaaS or SaaS), network segmentation, zero-touch provisioning and system analytics, and identify budget and resource constraints for enterprises operating across multiple locations and time zones. The implications of the in-house networking team's structure and its desired level of control over SD-WAN technologies and the final delivery model, must also be understood and clearly defined.

Application performance: Successful deployments can also depend on identifying the customer's performance requirements from critical applications, IaaS and SaaS, WAN optimisation and VoIP quality. SD-WAN integrators will examine factors such as application performance infrastructure, application-aware routing and the user experience. This input helps CIOs to decide if they want complete transformation or less ambitious, but not necessarily less complex, options, such as hybrids of existing MPLS networks.

Security and compliance: Enterprises may need outside help to assess the likely impact of traffic policies on the organisation, such as network segmentation, virtual routing and network function virtualisation (NFV). They can point out the potential constraints from industry-specific compliance demands and required encryption levels, as well as strike a suitable balance between direct internet access and local breakout needs.

Allied to rigorous SD-WAN assessments, there is the crucial, but often-underplayed phase of effectively planning the migration to new networks.

Phasing SD-WAN deployment: In some early SD-WAN migrations, despite support from their partners in tasks such as identifying the business case, the proof of concept, solution design and supplier evaluations, many IT teams were left to handle the details of end-to-end planning and scheduling the migration themselves.

Many in-house IT departments may lack the expertise to complete such detailed work. With less experienced teams, small errors at the migration stage could lead to failures, user frustration and increased cost. Experienced SD-WAN integrators can deliver a start-to-finish design and deployment approach that takes this planning burden away from the customer, removing the associated risks.

Like a coach guiding their athlete through training and those smart race tactics, so expert technology partners can provide different consultancy, professional services and as-a-Service technology offerings to guide enterprises across that elusive SD-WAN finish line.

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