Top 5 SD-WAN Challenges

What are the main challenges with SD-WAN?

SD-WAN can provide a variety of benefits to the organization if properly deployed and configured. Some of the biggest challenges that companies face when working with SD-WAN include the following.

#1. Security

SD-WAN is a networking solution designed to optimize traffic routing by moving it to the network edge. Each SD-WAN endpoint can optimally route traffic to the endpoint nearest its destination based upon application-specific priorities and rules.

By default, SD-WAN solutions do not have integrated security, making it necessary to route all traffic through a full security stack for inspection and threat prevention before allowing it to continue on to its destination. For many organizations, this forces a choice between not securing traffic on the corporate WAN or losing the benefits of SD-WAN by backhauling all traffic to the data center for inspection.

Additionally, SD-WAN solutions that integrate security commonly lack the next-generation threat prevention capabilities needed to protect against modern cyber threats. Securing the corporate WAN requires marrying the network optimization capabilities of SD-WAN with a next-generation threat prevention solution.

#2. Connecting users to applications

Adoption of cloud-based services and infrastructure has grown significantly in recent years, especially amid the pandemic. As corporate resources and IT infrastructure moves from the on-premises data center to the cloud, SD-WAN network designs must include efficiently and securely connecting users to public and private cloud applications.

This can be difficult as companies adopt distributed multi-cloud environments. Companies need secure, virtualized SD-WAN solutions that are cloud-native and have the same flexibility and scalability as the user to cloud infrastructures connections.

#3. Optimizing WAN to Internet performance

SD-WAN optimizes the performance and reliability of the corporate WAN by optimizing traffic over multiple transport media. By monitoring the health of various routes and choosing the one best suited to meet an application’s needs, SD-WAN can provide improved performance over default routing mechanisms.

However, the performance and reliability of SD-WAN are limited by the performance and reliability of the available transport media. SD-WAN solutions that optimally route traffic over the public Internet suffer from its inefficient routing and unreliable links.

To reliably meet service level agreements (SLAs), SD-WAN requires access to transport media with a certain level of performance. When possible, organizations need to design SD-WAN solutions that meet their service level requirements.

#4. Reducing costs

Cost reduction is a primary motivation for many organizations adopting SD-WAN. A major selling point of SD-WAN solutions is that it enables a company to achieve the network performance and reliability that it needs while reducing its dependence on costly multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) circuits.

However, SD-WAN’s cost savings and benefits can be difficult to quantify and compare to the capital expenditure of deploying it. SD-WAN improves network performance and increases employee productivity and access to corporate applications. While these improvements may be difficult to measure, they have a significant impact on the performance and profitability of the business.

#5. Management trade-offs

In the past, organizations needed to choose how the corporate WAN was managed. Companies could handle everything in-house, rely on a managed service provider to deploy and maintain their infrastructure, or share the responsibilities.

SD-WAN is designed to act as a virtual overlay on an organization’s network infrastructure, which provides significant benefits and introduces management challenges. SD-WAN solutions can be deployed on top of various infrastructure solutions and be composed of multiple vendors’ tools, making them complex to manage and update.