The rapid pace of technological advancement has accelerated digital transformation initiatives to deliver better customer experiences and personalized services, while addressing increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats is imminent. More than ever, organizations need flexibility to keep pace with business changes, but they are often hampered by sluggish and rigid network infrastructures.

In this article, we’ll cover the top five benefits of implementing an advanced SD-WAN solution and how it can accelerate business growth.

1. Increase business agility while reducing overall WAN costs

To connect branch offices to the corporate data center, businesses have traditionally used expensive MPLS lines. As more bandwidth is required to support the growing demand for connectivity, the cost of MPLS lines becomes prohibitive, preventing organizations from fully meeting their business needs. New MPLS lines can take up to four months to configure, which greatly reduces the ability to set up new branches. This hinders business change, agility and flexibility.

SD-WAN technology creates secure tunnels from branch offices to data centers and clouds by virtualizing and bonding network links, leveraging lower-cost Internet and 5G connections. To overcome the inherent shortcomings of Internet and wireless connections, such as packet loss and jitter, the Ogcloud SD-WAN Edge Platform employs path conditioning techniques including Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Packet Order Correction (POC) to improve the performance and reliability of these connections.FEC rebuilds lost packets at the destination without the need to retransmit them. In the case of link bonding, POC automatically sequences packets from different links.

With SD-WAN, organizations can achieve the flexibility they need for their business while reducing costs.

2. Improved Security and Seamless Transition to SASE Architecture

Enterprises based on MPLS router architectures cannot easily enforce security policies in branch offices due to the rigidity and complexity of their networks, especially in hybrid cloud environments. Security boundaries are disappearing as users and devices can now connect from anywhere. Traditional security measures such as VPNs are limited because VPNs do not support enforcement of fine-grained security policies. In fact, once users are recognized and authenticated through a VPN connection, they can access critical resources within the network, even if they are not supposed to.

OgCloud SD-WAN includes a zone-based firewall that provides role-based segmentation, allowing users or IoT devices to access certain areas of the network but ensuring that they can only connect to destinations on the network that match their role. By segmenting the network, IT departments can ensure that malware is not spreading unchecked throughout the network, but that threats are contained within segments.

OgCloud also provides automated orchestration and local integration with modern cloud security providers that support features such as ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access), SWG (Secure Web Gateway) or CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker). It enables organizations to choose the best cloud security provider to deliver the SASE architecture that best suits their needs.

SD-WAN is a foundational component for implementing a robust SASE architecture. By selecting the best security features that are tightly integrated with SD-WAN, organizations can ensure maximum protection for employees and other stakeholders accessing the network.

3. Enabling Cloud Architecture

Enterprises are migrating their applications to the cloud and using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) clouds to host business applications such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Box, Dropbox, ServiceNow, etc., rather than hosting them in data centers. However, primarily for security reasons, enterprises with traditional router WAN architectures continue to backhaul cloud-hosted traffic from branch offices to the data center, severely impacting the performance of cloud applications at branch offices.

OgCloud utilizes local Internet outages to intelligently direct traffic to its destination. It identifies the application on the first packet and, depending on the application and its security policy enforcement requirements, intelligently routes it back to the data center, either directly to the cloud destination or first to the cloud security enforcement point. For example, trusted business traffic (e.g., Microsoft 365) is sent directly to the cloud, traffic from on-premises applications or suspicious traffic is directed back to the data center, and other
other network traffic is directed to a cloud-hosted security provider for further inspection before being sent to its final destination.

In addition, OgCloud seamlessly integrates with cloud providers such as AWS and Azure to create a secure tunnel from the edge to the cloud provider. The process of connecting branch offices is seamless and can be accomplished with a single click.

SD-WAN enables organizations to embrace the flexibility of cloud architectures while improving cloud application performance by directing traffic to the cloud using local Internet breakout.

4. Simplifying WAN infrastructure

Over the years, organizations have built their own network infrastructure as their business has grown. Branch offices typically install a bunch of equipment in their facilities, including routers, firewalls, VPN concentrators, and WAN optimization appliances. Updating business or security policies, such as migrating applications to the cloud or improving quality of service, often requires manual reconfiguration of multiple devices. The plethora of devices not only requires advanced networking skills to maintain and manage, but also to manage multiple maintenance contracts.

OgCloud unifies routing, firewalls, WAN optimization, and SD-WAN in a single platform, enabling organizations to reduce their device footprint. Network architects simply define policies, such as connecting WAN optimization to MPLS routing or, in the case of SaaS applications, directing traffic to an embedded firewall and then to the cloud.

SD-WAN enables organizations to move to a thin branch model by reducing the number of devices in the branch, simplifying the network architecture, and significantly reducing WAN management overhead.

5. Centralize Network Operations and Gain Visibility

Too often, organizations must manage their network operations on a local basis, resulting in a lack of flexibility. Network deployment for new remote sites can be cumbersome and take weeks to complete. Enterprise IT departments often don’t have complete network visibility to fully monitor transmission throughput, packet loss, latency, and jitter. advanced SD-WANs such as Ogcloud continuously monitor the health of the network and automatically adapt to changing conditions, always delivering optimal application performance.

With Ogcloud, zero-touch provisioning automatically receives configurations from a centralized orchestrator, greatly simplifying the connection and deployment of new sites. Centralized orchestration also ensures that QoS and security policies are enforced seamlessly and consistently across new branches.

Ogcloud also provides health status graphs that summarize WAN transmission loss, latency, and jitter and provide a real-time view to proactively identify potential performance impacts. The dashboard centrally displays a summary of the health status of devices connected on the network, top callers, applications, topology maps, mean option scores (MOS), and more. All application traffic is easily identified by name and location, and alerts and prompts enable faster resolution of network issues. With SD-WAN technology, new branches can be set up quickly and easily, and security policy changes can be automatically distributed to hundreds or thousands of branches in minutes while minimizing errors. Network administrators can monitor network health from a single window and dashboard.

If you would like more information, please contact us at https://www.ogcloud.net/sdWan