Deploying SD-WAN can be a challenge for CIO

Rachna Tyagi
Sr. Global Technology Leader - British Telecom

“The challenge for CIOs is that deploying SD-WAN can be complicated because of all the factors that need to be considered. With legacy networks, there were limited options, so deployment was straightforward.

One of the aspects of SD-WAN is that businesses have more choice in flexibility in deployment, butthat comes with the burden of increased complexity. The challenge for today’s CIOs is to understandthe best way to move to SD-WAN quickly without the associated risk of trial and error and tweaking and tuning.

There has been much talk about Software Defined Networking (SDN) and how SDN benefits virtual environments and data centres. However an area that is often overlooked is how abstraction canapply to application performance and value across the wide area network (WAN).The WAN has always been about connecting users to applications and moving data more effectively over long distances. This includes connectivity for collaboration among enterprise users, clients,suppliers, and partners, as well as the movement of data over distance for disaster recovery and business continuity.While these requirements still exist, the adoption of virtualization and the cloud across traditional WAN architectures, such as MPLS, has introduced performance bottlenecks, thereby impairing user productivity when connecting to data centres and cloud applications from branch and remote office locations. As cloud initiatives gain momentum and traction, CIOs are increasingly revaluating their corporate WAN requirements.”