The wide area network (WAN) is the key determinant of application performance, user experience and other key IT success measures. According to Forbes, 83% of workloads will run in the cloud by the end of 20201. Yet, most current WANs were never designed to support the volume and types of traffic destined for the cloud—much less to meet the demands for application performance and the daily operations of today’s businesses.
What began more than 10 years ago with server virtualization, has manifested into the move to a next-generation WAN environment—the migration of compute and storage resources to a software-defined status.
The concept of using software to describe resources has become the standard approach and the future of IT for all three aspects of the infrastructure (compute, storage and networking). The first step to deploying a cloud-ready WAN is moving away from legacy WAN processes and technologies to services that can support the challenges of a cloud-driven IT environment. Utilizing a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) can solve many problems that legacy WANs present. Much as hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs) are already reaping the benefits of virtualization when it comes to compute and storage resources, expanding this approach to the WAN further optimizes end-to-end application experience for business users and yields many benefits, such as:
1https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2018/01/07/83-of-enterprise-workloads-will-be-in-the-cloud-by-2020/#30159dd6261a
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