SD-WAN Vendors

How do I select an SD-WAN vendor or provider?

Building on the earlier SD-WAN architecture discussion, how does one select between the approaches to generate desired business outcomes?

Traditional networking box vendors like Cisco, Juniper and others sell SD-WAN hardware along with some installation and maintenance services. Typically, enterprise customers buy various hardware elements and connectivity from multiple vendors and stitch the solution together in a Do-It-Yourself model. This requires house expertise or contractors to deploy the solution. Though it offers flexibility in terms of choice of equipment, it can be costly and complex as well as compromise on agility and potential deployment risk.

The alternative is to work with a managed service provider that sources SD-WAN technology from one or more networking and security vendors. Though this approach removes many of the deployment and maintenance issues inherent with DIY, it still introduces support issues and larger enterprises will reap more advantages due to provider focus. It also means working with telcos who have mixed customer support records.

Based on the above, questions to ask your SD-WAN technology vendor or telco include:

• Is the service fully managed with 24/7 support backed by global NOCs?
• Does it integrate last-mile connectivity with procurement and monitoring?
• Does it leverage a multi-cloud architecture with direct regional-based connectivity?
• Does it offer guaranteed application performance with integrated optimization?
• Does it leverage sophisticated Services PoPs for cloud-edge service delivery with proximity to most the world’s knowledge workers?
• Does it deliver global performance SLAs based on a dedicated private core with a SPOC?