IT & IT SECURITYGPSJAbove: Illustration by Alishia Hoyle - https://www.4bridgeworks.com/meet-the-artist-alishia-hoyle/Top right: David Trossell. Bottom right: Graham Jarvispacket loss. With SD-WANs, thereare often upfront costs relatedto the implementation of newinfrastructure; and an SD-WANvendor or management modelmay not be appropriate for theneeds of a particular purpose ororganisation, leading to highercosts.Trossell neverthelessrecognises that they havechanged Wide Area Networkingover time. He explains: “The 昀椀rstgeneration of SD-WAN solutionsprovided a new way of providing a昀氀exible range of features for WANarchitecture, and so no longerdid every bit of data but have togo via the data centre instead.”He says they provided the abilityto create a virtual network - oroverlay - on top of any serviceprovider or connection, creatinggreater 昀氀exibility to introducingcommodity connectivity, such asbroadband access into remotelocations.WAN Acceleration overlayHowever, despite theoverwhelming support in industryfor SD-WANs today, they oftenneed a boost. He argues that,while SD-WANs provide theadministrator with a whole rangeof facilities to manage howthe data 昀氀ows across physicalnetworks, it does not su昀케cientlytackle latency and packet lossat higher bandwidths thatSD-WANs are now reaching.This is despite them having alevel of deduplication, or WANoptimisation built into SD-WANproducts.He elaborates – counteringvendors’ claims that SD-WANsmitigate latency and packet loss:“When dealing with encryptedor previously compressed 昀椀lesformats, the SD-WAN cannot addto the performance of the datathroughput. It is only with WANAcceleration with its no touchdata handling, along with dataparallelisation, arti昀椀cial intelligenceand machine learning that webegin to see some useful dataacceleration performance levels.”“Adding a WAN Accelerationoverlay to the SD-WANcon昀椀guration can maximise thethroughput over the de昀椀ned WAN.Some customers have seen 50times the improvement over longdistances.” He believes that theadditional performance given byWAN Acceleration shows thatorganisations shouldn’t put alltheir eggs in one basket whenit comes to the need to improvedata 昀氀ows, network managementand achieve higher performance.Much depends on the speedof the WAN. Proofs of conceptcan show whether a WAN or anSD-WAN can bene昀椀t from WANAcceleration by adding to the data昀氀ow. “Slow protocols such as livevideo and voice are not suitablefor WAN Acceleration, as there isnot enough data available for theAI to work e昀昀ectively,” he explains.Other reasons for avoidingputting all of one’s eggs in abasket include vendor lock-ins,the lack of ability to completeautomate network managementand network administration –including in the mitigation oflatency and packet loss. So,organisations shouldn’t put alltheir eggs in one basket – atEaster or at any time of theyear – particularly becauseWAN Acceleration has a trackrecord with organisations, suchas Investec Private Bank, andthe National Institutes of Health(NIH) in the US, of overcomingconnectivity challenges andimproving overall networkresilience without the need toinvest in new infrastructure or toadd additional bandwidth.GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR JOURNAL WINTER 2024/202539
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