Traditionally, the challenge of most Network administrators was one of simple connectivity. With most applications running on private servers in a company's headquarters, the question was how to enable connectivity for other sites to access resources.

However, with the adoption of a hybrid model including SaaS, public and private cloud infrastructure and applications, such as Outlook365, Team, Zoom, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox, it's not just connectivity that's the concern - it's also the quality of the connection and the flexibility to simultaneously handle routing to both public and private facing applications.

This challenge has drawn attention to the solutions SD-WAN provides to make complex routing schemes simple and intuitive and to give better insights to the performance of the network and a responsiveness to handle any degradation which has been detected.

IMPROVED INTERFACE STATS
With SD-WAN, wired WAN, Wireless WAN (including wireless 2.4G/5G WAN, LTE WAN, and USB WAN), and VPN quality are monitored 24/7.

Using an “Average” Mean Opinion Score (MOS), Network administrators can view the sustained quality of a WAN interface, to easily determine the performance of each connection. “Active” Interface Quality, on the other hand, shows the interface quality right at that moment. By integrating percentage numbers, Network administrators can specify rules to load balance or failover based on the reliability and quality of connections. Ideally the connections should always be higher than the target MOS threshold. For example, 4.0 MOS out of 5 for important traffic.

INTERFACE QUALITY – FROM MACRO TO MICRO
In SD-WAN environments, more data is collected for every Interface on monitored CPEs. This makes it easier to create Dashboards to track any suspicious Interface quality results. Network administrators can dive into more details about an Interface, such as, data usage, latency, Jitter, and Packet Loss.

INTELLIGENT VOIP OPTIMISATION
SD-WAN also provides intelligent VoIP optimisation from the start of a VoIP call to the end. Based on your network topology and the Interface quality, SD-WAN intelligently assigns the best-quality WAN for VoIP calls. So whenever making a new call, SD-WAN makes sure you are calling via the best WAN.

After sending the VoIP call via best-quality WAN, SD-WAN will continue to monitor the quality of the live call and enforce a WAN failover to a secondary VoIP WAN if call quality is poor. As every call is logged with a MOS score and in-depth Interface data, the Network administrator can analyse and refine routing policies based upon WAN performance.

FULL TRAFFIC CONTROL WITH SD-WAN ROUTE POLICY
SD-WAN provides complete routing control by allowing Network administrators to specify the preferred route for selected applications/domains, to ensure their specific routing scenarios can be achieved. Sessions matching the criteria can be NATed or Routed, all under your control. It's especially useful if you have a mix of private/MPLS WAN (requires routing).

COMPONENTS AND TOPOLOGY
SD-WAN is a great addition to any remotely managed network of routers. It provides Network Admins information to assess the quality of a WAN interface, easily determine the performance of each connection and make intelligent decisions where to route traffic.

Here are the typical components for an SD-WAN network topology:

• Edge Routers Providing Edge Computing. Edge routers are physical routers installed in HQ and Branches.
• Established VPN tunnels from branches to HQ to form Hub-n-Spoke or Mesh topology.
• A central software platform where network administrators perform configurations, provisioning, and monitoring activity.