If you sat through a budget meeting where IT asked for money to change out the organization WAN circuit, you’ve probably heard SD-WAN banded about with a vague vague what it method to the business. The gap is important because SD-WAN decisions touch on things every executive cares about: the reliability of the connection between your offices and remote workers to company applications, how much money goes out the door monthly on network circuits, how fast any new location can become operational.
SD-WAN explained for non-technical stakeholders: a vernacular breakdown of the technology without weaving in networking background. You might find this useful to pull up (or share with) anyone outside of IT who needs context on why this investment is important.
What is SD-WAN really doing?
Imagine a company with an HQ and a few branch offices, and with more and more employees working on the road or at home, all needing reliable access to applications that may be in the data center or in the cloud (or both). Traditionally, this picture meant having to connect all those buildings with expensive leased dedicated circuits from the telecom provider that served each site, or multiple providers if they had buyers across different markets, a reliable but slow-to-scale and costly build-out.
SD-WAN changes that model. Rather than a single pricey dedicated connection at a location, it allows a company to combine multiple, often less expensive types of internet connections and automatically route traffic through the path that is working best at the moment. If, say, a video call begins to lag on one connection, this system can seamlessly switch that traffic to a more resilient path without requiring the end users at the branch office to even notice or take any action.
Why This Matters Beyond the IT Department
Why the business case for SD-WAN almost never starts with technology cost and speed; it begins there. Companies usually save significantly on their networking budget because it can use standard internet connections instead of only very expensive dedicated circuits. There are great advantages, such as the fact that new locations can be connected much more quickly, since internet service is available almost anywhere, whereas specialized dedicated circuits can take weeks or months to install.
The other half of the pitches is reliability. When a business relies on a single connection at each location, an outage on that connection can take the entire office offline. Because SD-WAN can aggregate and route traffic across multiple connections as needed, the impact of a single outage will not be nearly as detrimental to the business; this is extremely important for any company where downtime translates directly into lost revenue or unmet commitments.
What Business Leaders Need to Know About the Security Piece
Traditional approaches to networking have treated security as a separate, bolt-on layer later. SD-WAN platforms designed for today embed security into traffic routing and inspection, because, just as remote workers connect directly to the internet instead of backhauling everything through a central data center, branch offices need their own localized defense.
Federal guidance on this trend, the federal guide to Network Security, combines SD-WAN with other security concepts such as zero trust access and secure access service edge (SASE), explaining how modern enterprise networks need security embedded in the connection rather than a standalone add-on. However, for a business-level stakeholder, the conclusion should be clear: an intelligently designed SD-WAN deployment should not require performance compromises to achieve robust security. The two are designed to work together.
Where the Technology Comes From
None of this is made from ground zero. The SD-WAN standard runs on top of decades existing networking standards that detail how data moves reliably between locations and also across networks to begin with, such as foundational requirements for networking common for virtual LAN bridging, which controls just how devices on a network are intelligently separated and handled. It is here that the technical details of such standards do not need to be understood by business stakeholders, but knowing that SD-WAN is no experimental technology. It is based on an established, battle-tested framework that vendors have refined for years.
Questions to Consider Before Signing Off
A couple of questions set a well-scoped SD-WAN proposal apart from a vague one when seeking executive approval for the investment. But this, compared to what in a time frame? How is security managed at each branch, where are its facilities located and will it adhere to the level of expectation offered by the headquarters office? How does it failover, what happens during an outage and how quickly? It’s generally the case that having clear answers to these questions prior to project approval helps avoid the surprises sometimes evident months later during a budget review.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does switching to SD-WAN mean giving up on dedicated network circuits entirely?
Not necessarily. Many companies use a hybrid approach, keeping a dedicated circuit for critical traffic while adding standard internet connections for everything else, which SD-WAN can manage intelligently across both.
How long does a typical SD-WAN rollout take?
This varies by company size and number of locations, but a major advantage over traditional networking is that individual sites can often be connected in days rather than the weeks or months dedicated circuits typically require.
Is SD-WAN only relevant for companies with many physical office locations?
No. Organizations with a large remote workforce benefit as well, since SD-WAN principles extend to securely and reliably connecting individual remote workers to company applications, not just branch offices.