NC1811

FEATURESD-WAN
FOCUSING SD-WAN DEPLOYMENT
DESPITE THE MARKET HYPE SD-WAN IMPLEMENTATIONS CAN BE
DIFFICULT. MARC SOLLARS, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER AT
TENEO, CONSIDERS SOME IMPORTANT PLANNING AND
MIGRATION FACTORS
Many top athletes will follow their
coach's training regime and achieve
stunning results - but sometimes they
can still lose out in the final metres of their
race. This may be because they lack crucial
race experience, or were quietly elbowed out
during the last few metres. Similarly, for CIOs
and network infrastructure teams with clear
outcomes in mind, the fine details can be
challenging, and the final migration costs
difficult to control. Getting the IT team safely
across the SD-WAN finishing line, especially
with a complex migration, requires some
effort and skill.
The technical capabilities of SD-WAN
technology are so wide-ranging that
integration specialists have over time
developed start-to-finish approaches to
implementations for customers' pilot projects
and their subsequent deployments. These
methodologies help to identify detailed
business outcomes and assess suppliers,
making SD-WAN implementations more
manageable. There are some important
elements to consider.
Cost savings, or a new technology model: An
SD-WAN expert should consider the customer's
motivation for cost-saving and its implications
for the desired technology solution. Is the
business looking to salami-slice its legacy
WAN costs or make incremental gains on
supplier bandwidth KPIs? Or is SD-WAN a
lifecycle event, creating an opportunity to
ensure manageable monthly costs by using
managed services or new, as-a-Service
models? Or does the Board seek centralised
control to enable global upscaling?
Business agility: An experienced technology
partner should collaborate with the CIO and
the networking team to understand their
appetite for risk, any M&A activity and its
attitude towards site turn-up and tear-down.
It is important that they study the IT team's
policies on cloud (IaaS or SaaS), network
segmentation, zero-touch provisioning and
system analytics, and identify budget and
resource constraints for enterprises operating
across multiple locations and time zones. The
implications of the in-house networking
team's structure and its desired level of
control over SD-WAN technologies and the
final delivery model, must also be understood
and clearly defined.
Application performance: Successful
deployments can also depend on identifying
the customer's performance requirements
from critical applications, IaaS and SaaS,
WAN optimisation and VoIP quality. SD-
WAN integrators will examine factors such
as application performance infrastructure,
application-aware routing and the user
experience. This input helps CIOs to decide
if they want complete transformation or less
ambitious, but not necessarily less complex,
options, such as hybrids of existing MPLS
networks.
Security and compliance: Enterprises may
need outside help to assess the likely impact of
traffic policies on the organisation, such as
network segmentation, virtual routing and
network function virtualisation (NFV). They can
point out the potential constraints from
industry-specific compliance demands and
required encryption levels, as well as strike a
suitable balance between direct internet access
and local breakout needs.
Allied to rigorous SD-WAN assessments,
there is the crucial, but often-underplayed
phase of effectively planning the migration to
new networks.
Phasing SD-WAN deployment: In some
early SD-WAN migrations, despite support
from their partners in tasks such as identifying
the business case, the proof of concept,
solution design and supplier evaluations,
many IT teams were left to handle the details
of end-to-end planning and scheduling the
migration themselves.
Many in-house IT departments may lack the
expertise to complete such detailed work. With
less experienced teams, small errors at the
migration stage could lead to failures, user
frustration and increased cost. Experienced
SD-WAN integrators can deliver a start-tofinish
design and deployment approach that
takes this planning burden away from the
customer, removing the associated risks.
Like a coach guiding their athlete through
training and those smart race tactics, so
expert technology partners can provide
different consultancy, professional services
and as-a-Service technology offerings to
guide enterprises across that elusive SD-WAN
finish line. NC
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