Embracing hybrid connectivity with SD-WAN

Silver Peak’s ASEAN Regional Director Tricia Png observed, “An MPLS link to the branch to run business critical apps, with a broadband connection as backup, is a typical deployment.”

Tricia Png

After a year of launching their SD-WAN or Software-Defined Wide Area Network solution, Silver Peak has garnered over 200 customers worldwide, so they speak from experience when they identified top customer concerns when it comes to the WAN – how to manage rigid and complex legacy WAN infrastructure, whilst addressing performance and security concerns when embracing the Internet for transport?

Also, how to meet SLAs across increasingly sophisticated mix of apps and transport types while delivering an experience which is predictable?

Silver Peak claims to have the solution in SD-WAN to make Internet connectivity become more viable for businesses and increase network agility and performance.

The visibility challenge

Png herself has over 20 years of experience working at top networking and security companies. She said, “WAN is traditionally architected for the data centre environment, and not the cloud. But, more and more apps are migrating to the cloud.

“The problem is, once apps go to the cloud, IT departments lose control and visibility.”

This usually also spells deep problems for IT departments that hold security attributes very close to their hearts.

Png described, “Connecting end users to apps, takes time especially with SLA requirements. Users’ expectations are escalating, but legacy infrastructure is too complex.”

Silver Peak SD-WAN technologies

According to Png, Silver Peak recommends a systematic approach to deploying SD-WAN.

“Silver Peak helps by offering a single integrated WAN solution.”

This is a hybrid solution that provides connectivity on MPLS and broadband networks. Png noted that a lot of customers would go for the hybrid method over the next five years.

She also pointed out the benefits from Silver Peak solutions, namely sub-second failover and virtual overlay architecture that enables interoperability with third-party routers and firewall solutions.

“We have link balancing that is driven by business-intent policies to find the optimal path for data traffic,” Png also added.

Other Silver Peak technologies like path conditioning (with forward error correction and QoS) and TCP acceleration together with compression and caching, also help deliver a more secure, lower-latency experience that meets SLA requirements.