GPSJ Autumn 2024 ONLINE - Flipbook - Page 38
GPSJ
IT & IT SECURITY
The march to WAN acceleration:
Why organisations should avoid
putting their eggs in one basket
By Graham Jarvis, Freelance Business and Technology Journalist
Lead Journalist - Business and Technology, Trudy Darwin Communications
In this software-de昀椀ned era there is a new type of Wide Area Network (WAN) – the SD-WAN. It’s described by
World Wide Technology as “the next generation of WAN technology,” which forms the foundation of today’s
WAN infrastructure. This is positive for industry overall, since organisations often o昀昀er this as a service and it
can be hosted in a multitude of locations – changing where applications are located.
With traditional network
infrastructure, a hub-and-spoke
approach is deployed, with
organisations renting leased
lines “from service providers, to
interconnect remote locations
or central data centre hubs,”
explains the 昀椀rm. It then explains
that tra昀케c 昀氀owed from a remote
location (spoke) to a central hub
in order to reach applications
services and the public internet,
provided from central locations.
This network architectural
model was favoured for years,
as organisations became more
interconnected, as services
became highly centralised.
David Trossell, CEO and CTO
of Bridgeworks, comments:
“Organisations in the past have
used leased lines from service
providers to connect remote
locations to the data centre.
Data tra昀케c 昀氀owed to and from a
remote location to a data centre
to access applications and on
to the public internet, typically
provided from the Data Centre, all
under Central control.”
Demand for infrastructure
昀氀exibility
He says this hub and spoke
design became the model for
years. However, he adds that
“as organisations required more
interconnected applications, such
as the internet, this required more
昀氀exibility than the centralised
38
services in a few core locations.”
So, applications nowadays
- more often than not - exist
outside of any centralised hub,
and they may be stored in a
multitude of locations. In contrast,
the hub-and-spoke approach
meant that applications were
hosted in only a small number
of locations. Cloud-based
applications have also created
the ‘as-a—service’ notion over
the internet, while traditional
WANs often foundered on
performance bottlenecks –
making it impossible for the
new application models to work
properly. This was often due to
ine昀케cient tra昀케c 昀氀ows through the
central hub.
SD-WANs are tasked with
solving these issues. There are
four original core features of SDWAN: Transport independence;
application visibility; path
intelligence; and centralised
management. Vendors are
also now touting some form
of integration with arti昀椀cial
intelligence and machine learning
to manage latency and packet
loss. However, they aren’t fully
automated, as most network
management is still done
manually. Integral security is
another factor being promoted.
vendors use AI to “manage
their machinery, taking a natural
language to consider how to
implement it.” He remarked
that most devices use a speci昀椀c
AI language to create low-level
commands. As for AI itself, he
thinks everyone in networking has
jumped on an AI bandwagon. He
says he hasn’t seen anyone doing
anything automatically:
“Everyone has jumped onto
the AI bandwagon. I’ve not
seen anyone doing anything
automatically. I don’t think it
takes control of the network
switches, it’s more advisory, such
as how engineers can change
the network settings to improve
performance, whereas we allow
AI to manage the 昀氀ow of data.”
“It’s down to organisations to
昀椀nd out how they are going to
manage the network, but it won’t
be self-con昀椀guring. Engineers
will work on the feedback from
the AI, and then they will need to
昀椀nd a solution. They have bolted
things on rather than designing
what they do from scratch. It’s 50
years of the network working, so
how do you ditch it to become
graphically orientated, so it’s just
a matter of click, click, click and
it’s done.”
AI but not so automated
The key bene昀椀ts of SD-WANs
that are often promoted by
their proponents include
Trossell recently explained to
The Stack that some large
SD-WAN advantages
GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR JOURNAL WINTER 2024/2025
enhanced connectivity and
reliability; increased bandwidth
and e昀케ciency; easier network
management; improved cybersecurity and protection; the ability
to adapt to changing demand;
increase 昀氀exibility; cost-savings;
improved application and
network performance; improved
user experience and more
uptime.
Trossell opines: “The beauty
of SD-WAN is that it provides
centralised management that
allows for common templates
to be developed based on site
type, reducing the variations of
con昀椀gurations that were deployed
in the WAN.” He comments
that the days of con昀椀guring
hundreds of routers using a
CLI interface or visiting remote
sites have disappeared. Central
management tools allow for
customisable automation that can
be easily accessed using HTTPbased RESTful interactions over
the same WAN.
SD-WAN disadvantages
However, they have several
disadvantages. They include
security vulnerabilities; di昀케culties
in being able to monitor tra昀케c
昀氀ows; the complexity of being
able to enforce consistent
policies; the need for IT teams to
have training in order to manage
the complexities of SD-WANs to
avoid con昀椀guration errors and
