How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier

Software-defined WAN traffic is exploding, and so is the number of technology providers competing for enterprise SD-WAN customers. Here are some key issues to consider as IT pros investigate SD-WAN deployment options and weigh the importance of features such as application prioritization, multicloud support and integrated network security.SD-WAN technologies and services are designed to combine multiple physical WAN links into one logical network and provide traffic prioritization to accelerate application performance. Using network abstraction, SD-WAN improves the economics of branch connectivity by enabling organizations to leverage inexpensive circuits, such as the Internet, to address growing bandwidth requirements. SD-WAN is relatively easy to deploy and manage as it maps new services – application prioritization, security, management – on top of existing physical networks. When evaluating SD-WAN options (there are currently more than 30 providers of SD-WAN technologies and services), it's important to focus on the business value the technology can bring to an organization. For starters, organizations should review their current and near future requirement for connecting employees (and customers) in remote branch offices to mission-critical applications that reside either in a central data center or in the cloud. Some initial questions to consider include: How many branch locations do you currently have? How many employees are at distributed branches? Which applications are mission critical to distributed employees? Where are these applications hosted? (data center, SaaS, public cloud).