Lessons learned from SDWAN Deployments

#SDWAN is gaining traction with companies looking at IT WAN Transformation to benefit from #SaaS, #IaaS and general network growth. In my experience running the #professionalservices at @Viptela and now incubating the same service @Cisco, our customers are seriously evaluating and migrating to #SDWAN. The entire SDWAN migration journey may take 6-24 months from RFI/RFP proposal to Proof Of Concept (POC) to vendor selection, friendly trials and full roll out. 

After seeing 50+ successful customer deployments of #SDWAN in my short tenure at @Viptela and @Cisco here are some observations:

·     Enterprises are once again forced to evaluate the applications they care about. 

·     #Security analyses are once again becoming hot especially with increase in usage of #SaaS applications (#O365, #SalesForce, #WebEx etc) bringing #Cloud security providers to the table.

·     #MPLS and Internet networks are being reworked

·     #routing roll outs, happened many years ago, are once again getting a look over with separation of control plane and data plane in #overlay technologies. 

·     #DPI Deep Packet Inspection and #QoS Quality of Service are assessed

These are just few data point. However, I would like to emphasize that these evaluations and ROI calculations may take some time so if you are thinking of WAN transformation make your move on #SDWAN project sooner than later.

In my next post I will attempt at sharing successful deployment strategies for @Cisco #SDWAN from Plan Design and Implement (PDI) point of view.