In our SD-WAN FAQ video series, we answer the most frequently asked questions about SD-WAN adoption.
The second video in the series sees Mark Hall, Daisy Corporate Services’ connectivity expert, explain how SD-WAN can help organisations when it comes to connecting with cloud and SaaS applications.
Question 2 | How does SD-WAN help with cloud & SaaS Applications?
SD-WAN greatly enhances the way that users can connect with cloud and SaaS applications. Almost every business has, is in the process of, or will be looking to migrate to some kind of hybrid data centre model, and it’s unsurprising that this adoption of cloud applications is one of the biggest reasons to deploy a software-defined wide area network.
It’s not so long ago that the majority of business applications were hosted on-premise in private data centres. Now applications can be hosted in those same on-premise data centres, third party locations, cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon web services, or consumed in a SaaS model like Salesforce or Microsoft 365. All of this presents challenges around the best way to connect your users to that increasingly varied application environment, and it’s here that SD-WAN can really provide solutions to those challenges.
There are certain features of SD-WAN that enable networks (those that best connect users to applications and that retain the flexibility) to evolve as your IT and application strategy does. These include:
- Split tunnelling – allows you to connect users back into the corporate network but also directly out to the internet
- Path selection – decides how to most efficiently route traffic depending on traffic type and destination
- Load balancing – allows you to use all of the data available or the circuits at your site at any given time
Daisy works with Cisco to provide Meraki SD-WAN as a fully-managed service. Cisco is a leader in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.