SASE Bonus

The first several years of SD-WAN solutions consistently failed in production. This failure was primarily due to an overall lack of understanding of the differences between legacy, routed WAN solutions and the new SD-WAN solutions that leveraged policy differently to forward traffic instead of relying on the routing protocols. The disaggregation of data and control plan for policy-based decision-making in SD-WAN effectively grandfathered much of the skill of the world’s best network engineers. SD-WAN felt as if programmers purposely sought to eliminate network engineering as a skill in favor of active software-based decision-making.

It is interesting that the WAN engineer and the SD-WAN engineer can have an entire conversation using the same words but with two distinctly separate definitions for each word. Both WAN and SD-WAN designs use routing and policy but in completely different ways from each other. In fact, it has often been easier to teach SD-WAN to someone...