Many articles have been written about the technological changes taking place in the IT sector. The digital transformation of companies, the possibilities offered by the cloud and in general the need to make organizations more competitive, while keeping costs as low as possible, are factors that are of great concern to modern IT executives in Greece and abroad. The common denominator for the successful synthesis of all of the above is the network and the way it operates in an organization. The traditional architecture with which the network provided its services to organizations was based on traditional routers with the necessary circuits (of the appropriate number, type & BW) to be able to fulfill the interconnection needs of the site it served. The reality that we have all faced is that a large part of the BW of these circuits remains unutilized, the lack of automation & the need for continuous manual interventions in the equipment so that the environment is kept functional, etc. This static environment, which required continuous interventions by IT engineers, cannot meet the modern reality and the demands that an organization is called upon to face.
SDWAN technology comes to fill the gap that exists through the intelligence and automation that it can support. Now all the well-known manufacturers have approached this specific market and have prepared valuable solutions through which an organization can gain an operational advantage while reducing its operating expenses.
The use of SDWAN technology allows you to have complete visibility of an organization’s applications and the most basic characteristics of the circuits (BW, latency, jitter, etc.). It also allows you to set corporate policies per application type, in a dynamic way, so that in the event of non-compliance of the characteristics of a circuit, the specific traffic can be routed from another available circuit that supports the specific requirements. In addition, cloud applications & services are easily identified and, according to best practices, are routed directly from the sites, as close as possible to the source, resulting in a constant reduction in BW needs for leased circuits for connection to the central datacenter. The above allows an organization to reduce its telecommunications costs, without compromising its operation.
A great advantage is that the programming, management and monitoring of the infrastructure is done by a centralized tool – the orchestration engine. Everything is done more easily, centrally, from one screen, using configuration templates & appropriate dashboards. The environment becomes more manageable as with the use of templates there is consistency in the configuration of the sites and you can easily identify any inconsistencies and problematic elements in the configuration between sites. In the event that a new site needs to be added, the SDWAN equipment is sent and once connected, the configuration is completed from the central offices using appropriate templates that we have available. With the dashboards and end-to-end visibility that they provide to the infrastructure, you can easily see the infrastructure in depth in a structured way and find the problem faster than in the past. The ease of management allows an organization to maintain its smooth operation, but also to utilize its IT executives in a more efficient way, in an effort to find technological advantages to exploit for the benefit of the business.
In conclusion, it is important to mention that this is a modern technology that has been tested by large and demanding organizations in Greece & abroad and can be characterized as a stable & reliable environment. An organization only needs to trust an Integrator with relevant experience in the implementation of relevant projects in order to experience all the above advantages that this specific technology provides us.
