Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is an important new frontier for businesses, said Paul Griffiths, technical director, advanced technology group at Riverbed, at the Riverbed Force for Business South Africa 2015 in Johannesburg on Wednesday.
SD-WAN can help simplify branch IT and lower costs while improving reliability, Griffiths said.
Reliable availability of an organisation's services is becoming increasingly all-important, said Wimpie Van Rensburg, country manager for Sub-Saharan Africa at Riverbed, at a Riverbed press roundtable in Johannesburg on Thursday.
As consumers become more accustomed to having their demands met immediately, they are more and more likely to instantaneously turn their backs on a service when it is temporarily unavailable, Van Rensburg explained.
SD-WAN can also give organisations the agility to situate applications wherever they choose to within an infrastructure, said Griffiths.
"In a hybrid world, users shouldn't need to be concerned with where the data or applications they are consuming are located. The infrastructure should be abstracted from them so they can just use the application."
Structural shifts
Yet SD-WAN is an infrastructure rather than a singular product, which means its deployment can require major architectural changes, said Griffiths.
"To actually evolve your IT operations these days, you need to get rid of the silos," he said, explaining SD-WAN involves integration between often-separated IT components, such as networking and applications.
Yet this can be a major cultural shift for many organisations, said Van Rensburg. Larger organisations in particular tend to be less agile and more wary with regards to change, said Griffiths.
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