The rather simplistic term “the prime business of our organisation, is to ….”, replace the dots with, maximise profits, or expand product range, or improve health or increase sales, I could go on, but I think you have got the point. The “prime business of business” is rarely (if ever) to select the best WAN (wide area network) provider or technology. So, the question, how can businesses benefit from SD (software defined) WAN path selection is in essence a question, how can technology help the organisation better achieve its “prime purpose”.
In the case of SD WAN, the technology offers, in principle what most previous technologies offer. It offers a way of increasing productivity and reducing overall costs. So, in the instance where a organisations prime purpose is to “maximise profits”, a SD WAN offers to reduce the costs of WAN circuits and infrastructure, thus, increasing bottom line profitability (if indeed profitability is the prime purpose of the organisation).
The questions perhaps should be, what is SD WAN path selection? How does it improve productivity and/or reduce costs? What effort does the organisation need to expend to extract these benefits? What are the risks of change?
So, what is SD WAN path selection? The “WAN”, can be public (i.e. the internet), private (i.e. a leased line between two sites) or a combination (MPLS). Typically, the “more” private a connection, the more it costs to install, run and support. Internet circuits can be cheap, because by their very nature, they are aggregated shared services. Aggregated shared Internet circuits can be unreliable, become saturated, offer poor/no quality of service.
IT managers would have been brave or foolish (perhaps a combination thereof in) to recommend internet circuits for critical time sensitive communications. Equally, private circuits are expensive, can be time consuming to implement and, for the purposes of resilience, would ideally need two private circuits via differing physical routes via two different vendors, which increases complexity, cost and associated drama.
IT managers, in the past would be left with a Hobson’s choice, Private circuits or nothing, for the choice of using an Internet Circuit was not, in all practical respects be a realistic offer. However, we are now offered the alchemy of “SD WAN path selection”, through the use of smart routing and quality of service metrics, a network can now select a path based on what is most important to the organisation. If, for example, the organisation requires time sensitive data to be reliably sent and requires large file transfers to “chug away” in the background with no specific need for speed or reliability. Then, (assuming it is configured), network paths can be selected to optimise network traffic. But, perhaps, more importantly, SD WAN path selection, now allows a IT manager to mix their use of WAN technologies, they could, have a combination of private, MPLS and internet circuits, and use the wizardry of path selection to support resilience and quality of service.
Words or caution, all change has risk and all IT changes have risk squared. So, does the risk/cost of implementing SD WAN path selection merit the work? Should an IT manager acquire more white hair moving from a (hopefully) stable environment to a new world? Will SD WAN be just one more step towards the “cloud”, and as such, is SD WAN just an enabler. Is the relentless flow of new shiny technologies offering iterative improvements helping or hindering organisations with their prime purpose. With 5G in the (excuse the pun) horizon, is SD WAN path selection a complex answer to an insignificant question.