SD-WAN Experience

Based on the broad market failure of SD-WAN projects, service providers that studied their failure and adapted their strategy based on that hard education have been able to help clients achieve SD-WAN success. The organizations that have successfully installed SD-WAN across all or the majority of their sites have leveraged many of the lessons learned from the failed projects.

Today, there are production SD-WAN networks that consist of more than 10,000 sites. These implementations are generally a hub-and-spoke or dual hub-and-spoke design. Over time, the mechanisms required for successful full mesh designs will be refined allowing full mesh with minimal overhead. The early days of SD-WAN required three to five times the hardware cost to support the active management of large quantities of tunnels. Compare this with the fact that the average router installed over the history of routing managed one connection that had no encryption. The processor overhead for tunnel...