SMOAD Networks

June 13, 2024

Start your hybrid cloud journey with the SMOAD SD-WAN platform

A hybrid cloud is used to host applications, services, and data. It combines public and private clouds and comes with networking challenges like network performance optimisation, orchestrating WAN, and securing WAN connections. So, how do we counter these challenges? The answer lies in SD-WAN or software-defined wide area network. SD-WAN divides the management and control processes from the WAN hardware and virtualises the process as software or script-based configurations for quick and automated deployment.

What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN is a cloud-based service offering centralised management, giving you the flexibility to control your WAN architecture from a single dashboard. Let us discuss how SD-WAN for hybrid cloud can help resolve optimisation issues in the cloud environment.

Benefits of SD-WAN for Hybrid Cloud

  • SD-WAN combats the challenges of orchestrating WAN connections across hybrid cloud infrastructure. Different clouds have varied administrative authority levels, which means your administrator user role may not give the same control level across networking platforms.
  • Moreover, other providers offer different degrees of visibility into WAN connections. You can reach different clouds using multiple types of WAN circuits like broadband, MPLS, and LTE. It may become challenging to employ network automation because you have to customise the configurations for each WAN link.
  • Using SD-WAN, you can enjoy complete visibility and control over the whole WAN architecture across public and private clouds.
  • The management processes are disassociated from the underlying hardware; the WAN circuits become manageable from one location, irrespective of the type. This means the enterprise is not dependent on vendor-provided tools to manage the WAN connections.
  • Moreover, you can implement role-based access policies to your WAN connection.
  • Now, your administrators can have uniform control across the entire environment. SD-WAN allows orchestration by providing comprehensive and consistent control over hybrid cloud WAN infrastructure. It also offers vendor-neutral orchestration to manage the hybrid cloud.

The challenge in hybrid cloud infrastructure lies in maintaining the performance and speed of WAN connections between the organisation and the cloud providers. Here are some ways to overcome this problem:

  • With complete visibility of your WAN architecture, you can monitor the performance of the hybrid cloud infrastructure for uniform availability and speed across the site.
  • Guaranteed minimum bandwidth and application awareness are some of the network optimisation features that can improve the connection across critical applications and services.
  • SD-WAN offers an on-ramp to SASE, which means you can isolate cloud-destined traffic from your branch office and WFH employees and direct it through a secure connection directly onto the public or private cloud resource. SASE with SD-WAN removes the need to backhaul the network traffic through a firewall on your business network, thereby reducing the bottlenecks and enhancing network performance for both on-premises and off-premises systems.
  • SD-WAN offers true hybrid cloud WAN orchestration where most optimisation between sites happens automatically. Network engineers need not manually monitor, optimise, or troubleshoot WAN traffic.

SD-WAN allows easy maintenance and automatic monitoring of WAN performance. It provides an on-ramp to cloud security through automation.

Using SD-WAN provides secure and effective connections by applying advanced security features across cloud-based and remote traffic without the need to haul it through the primary data centre. Cloud security technology stacks like FWaaS, ZINA and CASB are clubbed into one cloud-based service.

Using SD-WAN technology, SASE separates the WAN traffic destined for the cloud location by routing it through the cloud security platform and directing it to the destined locations. This makes it easy to apply enterprise security policies and controls to remote and cloud-based traffic without compromising security.

Another prominent feature of SD-WAN for hybrid cloud is application-aware routing. It helps detect and route the cloud-destined traffic across a secure SASE stack. SD-WAN is the ideal option if you want safe and efficient access to hybrid cloud services.

The benefits of SD-WAN in hybrid cloud infrastructure are immense, but success is based on choosing the right solution to orchestrate and manage your architecture. SD-WAN in hybrid cloud infrastructure helps to scale, secure, and speed up network performance. It seamlessly allows management of workloads both on-premises and remote in a cloud environment. Scaling and migrating to multiple locations is simple when powered by SD-WAN.

SMOAD Managed SD-WAN is a point solution for interconnecting distributed offices, mobile users, and cloud workloads. With SMOAD, security is not compromised until the last mile. SMOAD offers unparalleled scalability, end-to-end management, and in-depth discovery. For more information, call us for a demo.