How SD-WAN can help in meeting increasing cloud-based demands

The traditional corporate WAN (wide area network) architecture became prolific in the client/server architecture era. We designed and built WANs to largely support branch-to-datacentre.  On paper, these often looked like Clouds, but they are in effect hub and spoke networks – the hub being the data centre.  This worked reasonably well when most of our applications were hosted in one or two datacentres, and access to the Internet was centralised and only available through the Data centre firewall. Unfortunately, with the increasing use of the cloud this architecture has become costly and inherently inefficient, ultimately compromising application performance, business agility, and employee productivity. Most significantly the WAN is becoming a blocker to digital transformation, rather than an enabler.