What is SD-WAN, and what does it mean for networking, security, cloud? [Video]

Software-defined wide area networks offers ease of deployment, central manageability, reduced costs, and can improve connectivity to branch offices and the cloud.

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The most important change to wide-area networking over the past few years has been the widespread deployment of software-defined WAN technology, (SD-WAN), which changes how networking professionals optimize and secure WAN connectivity.

What is SD-WAN?

SD-WAN uses software to control the connectivity, management and services between data centers, remote offices and cloud resources. Like its technology brother software-defined networking (SDN), SD-WAN works by decoupling the control plane from the data plane.

An SD-WAN deployment can include existing routers and switches or virtualized customer premises equipment (vCPE) all running some version of software that handles policy, security, networking, and other management functions.

One of SD-WAN’s key features is the ability to manage multiple connection types (MPLS, broadband,wireless), and to segment, partition and secure the traffic traversing the WAN.

What are the benefits of …