With the advent of cloud computing, traditional WANs (or wide area networks) offer a significantly lower user experience compared to that offered by SD-WANs. This is explained by the fact that WANs were designed in an era when there was not as much traffic coming from the cloud.

This is because previously, users logged in at the branch office, while the site logged in to applications hosted on data center servers. It's a whole different story now, with SaaS applications and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) residing in different clouds.

Problems with traditional WANs

• MPLS circuits, which provided security and promoted better connectivity, are no longer efficient in a cloud-centric environment.
• The WAN network can result in reduced employee productivity due to performance issues with SaaS applications.
• It is very expensive to ensure the security of a WAN network where the majority of applications are hosted in the cloud.  
• A WAN can be very expensive if the use of dedicated and standby circuits is inefficient.

Today, organizations with multiple remote offices are moving from low-performance WANs to SD-WAN.

SD-WAN is a bit like the network traffic controller: it determines the path to take for MPLS, 4G / 5G and broadband links, allowing businesses to enjoy quick and easy access to the most critical business applications. more important in the cloud thanks to transport independence across the different types of connections.

His advantages

• reduce expenses by replacing MPLS with more flexible and less expensive bandwidth.

Improves user experience with apps

• Essential business applications remain reliable and available at all times.
• All scenarios in the network have multiple active hybrid links.
• Provides dynamic application traffic routing that is application centric.

Increase security

• Provides security to branch offices and remote access points (because it integrates a firewall as well as next-generation antivirus and DNS security).
• Ensures a centralized policy with real-time segmentation and access control.
• Protects against threats at a strategic point.
• Protects broadband internet and cloud traffic.

Improves cloud connection

• Extends the WAN network to public clouds transparently.
• Optimizes the real-time performance of priority SaaS applications.

Simplify management

• Provides an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use dashboard for configuring WAN, cloud, and security as needed.
• Enables application and WAN performance reports to be produced, useful when it comes time to analyze bandwidth requirements.