The Importance of SD-WAN in the Industrial Industries

The Industrial Space

Companies operating within the industrial industry often have multiple facilities that are geographically distributed. This poses unique connectivity challenges for companies in the sector when trying to work with traditional wide-area networks (WAN). When a new facility is added, companies must add new hardware to support their traditional WANs, making them unwieldy and less scalable. Hybrid work and increasingly distributed manufacturing facilities have forced operators within the sector to rethink their network priorities entirely. As an enterprise operating within the sector, you must ensure that facilities and remote users can securely connect from many locations while simultaneously monitoring their app performance and managing their networks.

Cloud and industrial internet of things (IoT) technologies have allowed organizations to become increasingly digital and more agile, but the adoption of these technologies has also placed tremendous strain on traditional WAN architecture. You can benefit from changing to a software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) so that you can address multiple issues a traditional WAN can’t adequately cover, including security, application performance, and connectivity. Traditional WANs that are relied on by many organizations in the industry are too rigid, aren’t scalable, and lack the resiliency needed for optimal uptime and performance. By contrast, a software-defined wide area network is cloud-ready, scalable, and can quickly connect numerous users and remote facilities.

What is SD-WAN?

SD-WAN controls the management, services, and connectivity between different facilities, data centers, the cloud, and remote offices by using the software to separate the data and control planes, and improve network operations and traffic routing. It works as an overlay network on top of the underlying WAN infrastructure and existing connections and separates the network services from the infrastructure to optimize how data is routed across the network.

A software defined wide area network is managed through a central controller that transmits data to the connected devices so that routers can be configured remotely and connected resources can be programmed and managed without having to be physically present. A deployment can include virtualized customer premises equipment (vCPE) or existing routers that run the software to handle networking, security, policy, and networking management functions.

Software-defined WANs unify communication paths and optimize application performance by implementing tunneling solutions on top of the pre-existing architecture. Enterprises have the option to dynamically connect facilities by leveraging cloud capabilities together with integrated intelligence, making SD-WANs much simpler to deploy enterprise-wide.

A key feature of a software-defined WAN is its ability to manage multiple types of connections and to petition, segment, and secure the traffic traveling across the WAN.

Software-defined WANs vs. Traditional WANs

A traditional WAN requires your organization to purchase and install circuits to route internet protocol services by using layers of hardware to complete networks. The scope and size of these traditional networks make managing them much more difficult because of all of the processes required to manage activity on the network and the number of devices installed.

With legacy WANs, security is typically handled by using access control and IP block lists to prevent the infiltration of malware and other malicious data. A traditional WAN is centrally managed with routers and applications. To set up additional facilities, you must purchase and install additional hardware. This can quickly drive up your organization’s costs. Traditional WANs are also more difficult to scale since they require advanced planning and additional logistical support to install the infrastructure required to bring operations online at additional locations.

By contrast, a software-defined WAN allows internet and cloud capabilities to be leveraged so that network traffic between the organization’s headquarters and its other facilities can be easily managed. Network segmentation also allows different facilities to be zoned, and the deployment of a software-defined WAN is much faster than the planning and support required to deploy a traditional WAN that covers a large area.