During this time of Covid19 crisis & resultant global lockdown, irrespective of any vertical, industry or domain we all are supposed to work from home & keep the businesses running as much as we can. Even when the situation improves and offices reopen, we very well may be required to maintain social distancing at workplace. The scale and spread of this pandemic is set to change the way we live & work. Almost all enterprises across globe have long realized that in today’s ever changing fast paced business environment, to grow or even survive, digital transformation is a must. Enterprises which are already digitized are in much better position to achieve not only the targets they originally set out for their transformation programs but also deal with the unexpected Covid19 pandemic. The scope of digitization includes adoption SDN, NfV & cloud. Of course there will be business disruptions with this the unexpected & unprecedented situation we are facing now, however the extent of disruption will depend on the extent a particular enterprise is digitized or rather not digitized. So how enterprises can provide business continuity will very much depend of technology. SDWAN is one such technology that can come to the rescue.
At this time all the users are working from their homes. There are effectively no LAN networks in action. They do exist in offices but not available to business users anymore! So all those users are going to access their business applications & services over WAN. In a way, all the LAN users have overnight turned to become WAN users! The WAN has become incredibly huge. The traditional WAN technology solutions aimed for relatively less number of individual on-the-go mobile remote users will be stretched to limits. Software centric networking of SDWAN can solve some of the inherent challenges with legacy WAN network solutions.
A lot of experts always believed that the future roadmap of SDWAN would be to extend SDWAN fabric perimeter for mobility i.e. extending SDWAN to remote users & devices (mobiles, tablets etc.) Amongst other things, that would require features for end point management & remote access baked into the core SDWAN solution. If we throw IoT also in the mix, it can translate to the scalability needs much further – to hundreds of millions to billions end-points! This poses some interesting challenges like security, identity management, collection & analytics of big data. Most of this data would be real time so SDWAN solution must factor latency & jitter across a variety of transport media including 5G. Though IoT scope is perhaps too much into the future, we can clearly see that the current Covid19 situation has certainly emphasised the need of mobility support for SDWAN fabric. It may now become a matter of urgency to provide connectivity to all the dispersed home workers. If an enterprise has not yet adopted SDWAN at all for their global footprint connectivity, it’s the high time they seriously consider it. One of the most important factor for such businesses would certainly be ease & speed of deployment of the solution.
The software driven nature of SDWAN solution has the potential to provide this agility & flexibility to solve this business challenge. Baring a few, who already have full-fledged SDWAN solution deployed, most of the enterprises embarking SDWAN journey will most probably are at different stages of its adoption like POC, pilot or live rollout. They would like to go to the next stage of their journey as soon as possible – device mobility. They would preferably like their staff to connect to corporate network & access all required applications & services seamlessly. In a way the ideal scenario would be to make users connect to corporate SDWAN from their homes as if each home is like a branch of corporate network.
For the enterprises who already have some SDWAN solution in place, it’s a matter of delivering edge devices to employee’s homes. A lot of these small form factor compact edge devices costs only few hundred dollars or the cost of an average workplace laptop. The advancement in technology including purpose built ASICs powers these devices so they can provide more than decent level of performance. Licence fee can be negotiated with the vendor with pay as you go model. Some vendors are even offering free trials and/or free extensions of licensing during the ongoing period of pandemic situation.
As we know, there are a lot of SDWAN offerings available in the market. Some minimum common features available in almost all these solutions already provides an edge over tradition WAN networks to cope up with this situation. Some of these features are:
- ZTP: One of the most common feature of SDWAN is ZTP or zero touch provisioning. Edge devices in a SDWAN solution are kind of plug & play. This reduces the need of an IT trained staff onsite at the branches to test & turn up the site. All it needs is any business end user plugging in the internet circuit on the edge device, which in most cases is via all familiar Ethernet patch cable. The software driven centralized controller configures the edge device automagically with all the relevant business policies! Test n turn up is easy, smooth & fast. Businesses can turn up tens or even hundreds of sites on daily basis. In this case, home users.
- Transport independence: Any transport can be used as the underlay, most importantly, including ever present Internet and mobile networks. In this age where most households usually have broadband or at least some sort of internet connectivity available, it provides a quick way to connect to your corporate SDWAN fabric. If direct internet or broadband is not available, no problems, mobile (3G/4G) connectivity will do!
- Network segmentation: Ability to keep different types of applications traffic separate from each other so that business traffic isn’t mixed with traffic types like gaming.
- Application awareness: SDWAN can identify & differentiate applications at the source i.e. at the edge device or the entry point to the SDWAN fabric. Business application policy can dictate business critical applications are given higher priority and thus better user experience. (Though application policy will control the relative performance between business apps, the overall experience will depend on the links throughput. Also most of the home users will have only one (internet) transport link so no path switchover is possible.)
- Application performance visibility: It’s not enough just to enable your workforce work from home & forget about it. It’s equally important to continuously monitor the applications & performance of these application for the end users. Application visibility, monitoring & analytics provided either by in-built engine of an SDWAN solution or by using and integrating a 3rd party tool provides us an sneak peek into what application are running and how are they performing over the WAN. Some of these tools use advanced AI & ML to provide real insights of your traffic flow. This can in turn allow us to fine tune the network based on applications performance.
- Central Control: SDWAN treats the whole network of any size as a single unit i.e. it can be managed, controlled & operated from one single location. So adding or removing sites or end points, policy changes, routing behaviours, all this can happen on the fly in real time. It can be useful for situations where some enterprises can apply different policies to different types of sites like retail stores, factories, warehouses etc. or user’s types.
All these factors come into play to help businesses enable themselves for preparedness against this type of Covid19 lockdown challenges.
In addition to this, there are some other aspects of the solution enterprises should consider while choosing any SDWAN solution. These are features which are largely optional in a typical SDWAN product but can help in SDWAN adoption in many ways like accelerating the deployment times. So this can prove to be one of the deciding factors in choosing an SDWAN solution
- Cloud on-ramp.
- Edge device with support for 3G/4G
- Tunnel type – Static or dynamic and tunnel scalability
- As a service or product
- Enterprise grade security
- Quality of experience
So in a nutshell, an SDWAN solution has the potential to provide multiple benefits including business continuity in event of Covid19 type pandemic.
Santosh Karki 