SD-WAN could help SMBs deal with network challenges - but be sure of the issues first, say experts

"No-one should ever deploy technology for technology's sake," says Citrix's Justin Thorogood

Small and medium-sized businesses should consider implementing software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) technology as a means of improving the bandwidth between disparate offices.

That's the advice of Justin Thorogood, manager for partner strategy and development at Citrix, responding to a question from an audience member in a Computing web seminar entitled 'Is your business up to the global networking challenge of the cloud?'

Answering an audience question posed by the IT director of a small and medium-sized business with three branch locations, Thorogood advised considering exactly what the organisation's ‘pain point' might be.

"No-one should ever deploy technology for technology's sake - there has to be a defined problem you want to deal with," Thorogood said.

He continued: "First and foremost, look at the applications that you have rolled out and ask yourself, what of those applications are business critical? Is the amount of available bandwidth inhibiting you from achieving what your ultimate goal is?

"We see organisations that would love to roll-out Skype for Business to all of their locations, for example, but because of bandwidth limitations they are not able to do so at a reasonable cost."

Organisations also need to look at the services available locally to branch offices. In many cases, DSL lines might provide more than sufficient bandwidth.

"Look at the services that are available in each of those locations," continued Thorogood. "How important is uptime to your organisation? What is the cost of downtime? That's the thing that no-one likes discussing, but that everyone should consider. Are there services that could be consolidated at each branch? Could you look at consolidating the router itself?

"One element is WAN optimisation. This is part and parcel of the solution we offer [for SD-WAN management]. Not only can we effectively compress the information going across the link, but select the link that's most available at that time. This can be offered through a single appliance, or via software, depending on the size of the branch.

"There are circumstances where a hardware appliance might be too costly," Thorogood concluded.

"Adoption invariably comes down to 'pain'," added Andrew Scott, network systems engineering manager, UK & Ireland, at Citrix. "If you don't have a challenge in your branch estate, then I'd question whether you'd look to change anything.

"In a lot of conversations that Justin and I have with users, it's always around people and their challenges; they want a better service, or they are trying to mitigate some of their costs.

"With SD-WAN you don't need to do every branch, you can just do it tactically across a few branches to address some of the challenges that have developed within certain parts of the infrastructure…

"The assumption is that you have got to adopt it across the board in order to get it, but actually you should look to SD-WAN to address where you've got challenges. If there isn't really a challenge, there's not a lot of point in adopting it," said Scott.

The location of the organisation's satellite offices might also be an issue, he suggested. "Is one in New York, one in the Far East and one in London, or are they all in the south-east of England?" he asked.

Branches relatively close together, geographically, might benefit from multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), but the more widely dispersed the network, the bigger performance hit that MPLS entails, he warned.

The checklist could be summarised as follows:

The web seminar, 'Is your business up to the global networking challenge of the cloud?', was broadcast online on Tuesday 17 October 2017, but will be available for viewing on Computing shortly.