SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) has grown over the last four years: from a concept spoken about only in forums and dimly lit DevOps departments to software that is littered across every IT company’s flyer as their new cutting edge product. In 2017, NetworkWorld estimated that SD-WAN held less than 5% of the WAN market share but with the 59% annual growth in revenue for SD-WAN vendors, predictions for 2020 look to a $1.2 billion market.
What is SD-WAN?
SD-WAN is the next step of software-defined networking (SDN), which is used primarily in local area networks (LANs), to enable connections over WAN. SD-WAN effectively allows the simplification of the management and operation of a WAN by splitting the networking hardware from its control mechanism. This allows the consolidation of a complex infrastructure of WAN path controllers, WAN optimizers, and firewalls into either a single box or software that runs on any commercial infrastructure.
Why is SD-WAN Important?
From a business perspective, this consolidation of infrastructure required for effective WAN architecture has allowed for massive savings in the form of both capital and operational expenditure. When Gartner looked into these promises of savings they found that on average, the introduction of SD-WAN into an enterprise environment would lead to 64.8% savings over the course of three years. This drastic drop in budget requirement helps enterprise-sized companies reallocate resources (both fiscal and technical) to projects focused more on the generation of revenue. This ‘price drop’ also allows mid-market and SMB companies who had previously lacked the resources to build an effective WAN architecture to be able to take advantage of this technology.
With the flexibility of SD-WAN, businesses will have more options with vendors and provide extra resiliency to their networks. On top of that, the convenience of a centralized management system and full visibility across branch networks can help network teams troubleshoot issues quicker than before.
How does LogicMonitor fit in with SD-WAN?
At LogicMonitor, there is a central drive to provide an infrastructure monitoring solution that proactively grows with each new technology in the market. With our SaaS-based tool, we provide a growing library of 2,000+ integrations both in hardware and software across any hybrid environment. This includes public (i.e. AWS, GCP, and Azure) and private cloud as well as on-premises infrastructure. Our focus to be leaders in the infrastructure monitoring space has resulted in the production coverage of microservices, container monitoring and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. But in relation to SD-WAN, LogicMonitor commands extensive monitoring of the leaders in the market of SD-WAN as established in 2018 by Gartner, including Meraki, Silver Peak, Viptela, and Riverbed to name a few. We can provide metrics to help you track the health and performance of your SD-WAN environment as you make this critical transition in your organization.
Overall, SD-WAN is one of many technological strides being made within the infrastructure space to enable efficiency, automation, scalability, and consolidation. At LogicMonitor, we not only emulate these values but also look forward to the variety of technologies on the cusp of entering this ever-changing field.
