An executive of network hardware company Silver Peak expects a rising demand for software-defined wide area network or SD-WAN technology in the Philippines as companies migrate to the cloud.
“The Philippines is a cloud-first country, and we expect to see further demand for SD-WAN as Filipino enterprises accelerate their cloud migrations, connecting users to applications with the highest levels of performance regardless of where the applications reside,” says Dean Vaughan, Silver Peak vice president for Asia Pacific and Japan.
“For some time now, ‘digital transformation’ has been touted as the driving force that would propel companies to the ‘next level’. But what does that really mean? One thing’s for sure — it goes beyond making sure that each and every member of the organization knows how to use the necessary digital equipment and platforms,” he says.
Digital transformation demands the strengthening of a company’s IT infrastructure, he says. “In other words, its digital backbone has to be solid. It must be able to easily adapt to other technologies and applications that have become part of the IT infrastructure — such as multi-cloud environments. This is where SD-WAN technology comes in, and it is imperative to select the right SD-WAN solution in order to drive top-down business intent to fully realize the transformational promise of the cloud,” says Vaughan.
Silver Peak founder and chief executive David Hughes says: “All the discussion around SD-WAN has helped shine the spotlight on the business value enterprises can realize by changing the way they build and manage their wide area network. As enterprises turn to multiple cloud deployments, SD-WAN provides a uniform network fabric between physical locations and across cloud instances. Automation will make adding new cloud instances easy and fast, despite the inherent complexities and idiosyncrasies of each underlying cloud environment.”
SD-WAN helps solve the inherent problem created by router-centric Multiprotocol Label Switching WAN architectures that were never designed for today’s agile cloud era, according to Vaughan.
Conventional router-centric WAN approaches are complex and expensive to manage and are unable to keep up with the shifting traffic patterns of cloud applications and services beyond the data center. To be freed from this constraint, forward-thinking IT organizations are turning to SD-WAN solutions and shifting toward a business-first networking model where the network enables the business, rather than the business conforming to the constraints of traditional branch router architectures, he says.
In the past, enterprises used to build router-centric MPLS-based networks as applications were hosted on-premise within corporate data centers, with little cloud or internet-destined traffic.
As more and more applications moved to the cloud, enterprises were forced to backhaul cloud-destined traffic from branch offices to the centralized data center instead of routing traffic directly to SaaS and IaaS instances. This approach is highly inefficient and difficult to manage, and application performance suffered as a result as well.
“In the face of the said challenges, although the required technology has been made available for some time, it wasn’t fully embraced as the IT department was having difficulties adjusting to these new protocols because it wanted to retain control and manage security,” says Vaughan.
“However, as network and application control becomes increasingly difficult to manage due to growing complexity and more applications moving to the cloud and getting dispersed, IT organizations and users now realize they need to solve the problem fast,” he says.
“That is why Silver Peak leverages a first-packet inspection engine so that enterprises can apply intelligence to identify and classify applications on the first-packet to automatically steer internet bound traffic to the correct path in compliance with application-driven business and security policies,” he says.
“The bottom line is that the right SD-WAN solution will liberate companies from the limitations of router-centric architectures and transform their networks from a business constraint into a business enabler,” says Vaughan.