We are nearing the holidays, and that has every CIO or CTO making out their wish list to Santa for what they want, indeed need in 2018. With visions of digital transformation dancing in their heads, most IT executives realize it’s time for a new story to be told when it comes to connecting their users to their applications no matter where they are hosted. We were taught in primary school that every good story needs six basics: ‘Who, What, When, Where, Why and How’. When it comes time for you to transform your wide area network, the five Ws are not in dispute, but the way in which you tackle the ‘How’ will make all the difference as to whether you will get a lump of coal or a nice new raise from your boss a year from now!

The Ws are easy when determining enterprise WAN transformation:

- Who: Every enterprise on the planet should be re-evaluating their WAN’s for cost and agility.
- What: Employing an SDWAN solution into your branch network is the right concept.
- When: Start now! Don’t delay! The technology is mature and benefits are waiting.
- Where: Globally, at each of your remote locations, connecting to your head-ends and cloud locations.
- Why: Increased user experience, greatly improved business agility, and tremendous cost savings.

But what about the elusive 'How'? There are three primary points of consideration to the ‘How’ of your design that will bring smiles like presents at Christmas:

First, many an analysts state that most of enterprises will turn to their current telco service provider to migrate them to an SDWAN solution. I find this as mysterious and confusing! With apologies to my friends in that industry, telcos are expensive, slow, and generally lack good service. We stand at the most important inflection point in networking in decades when innovation, automation and orchestration have finally awakened from

their dormant, hibernation state, and it’s farfetched to assume that many enterprises will turn to their existing, or any telco, to help them lead the charge.

With visions of digital transformation dancing in their heads, most IT executives realize it’s time for a new story to be told when it comes to connecting their users to their applications no matter where they are hosted

In the last few months, I have heard many telco’s offering a ‘free SDWAN upgrade’ to their enterprise customer; meaning the telco won’t charge for the technology change, but the enterprise costs aren’t going to do down either. In another example, a prominent telco earlier this year announced that SDWAN was fine for SMB market, but MPLS revenues would stay flat or grow for enterprise customers. For those of you keeping score at home, an SDWAN migration should come with a very healthy cost productivity target; something far less than ‘at current cost’ certainly.

The second 'How' consideration is where to place security protection into your solution. Trends to date have been to consider cloud security services providers,or perhaps even to house security deployed, as software constructs into cloud service providers themselves. Neither of these are the right choice. While I have been a fan of cloud service security providers, consider that by using their services to employ software; you are covering their cost of not just security software but their appliances at their data centers employing their transport. Boxes, facilities and circuits cost real money that you are paying for the security solution to be delivered from the cloud! And speaking of cloud, yes, you can pay less perhaps for centrally placing security software into the cloud. But you still must backhaul traffic to get it there, and you are still paying some for facilities and compute on which it is run. The correct choice for security protection in your ‘How’ is to distribute the security software to the branch itself at exactly the point where it is needed. Here, the security can be delivered in near pure software form, not incurring additional costs for tin and wire. You also want to deploy security capabilities in a flexible manner such that you can service chain its delivery only where and when it is needed, and not have it always on as some warm, overgrown security blanket that gives a vague sense of comfort but not specific protection as needed.

Finally, the third ‘How’ characteristic is to employ a solution which has a rich, robust set of SDWAN, analytics and security features that are natively available from one provider who has demonstrated their capability over time to deliver new functionality in an agile, quick manner. Choosing a solution that has a full suite of such capabilities, and who do not have to integrate with a 3rd party NFV provider means that you have a more simplistic, less complex and less costly solution which is always best. In summary: Yes, there is an agile and cost-effective WAN to be had. Just make sure that you (1) Seek a telcoagnostic solution provider (2) Deploy security at the branch in software form,and(3)Leverage a provider who has a full set of software capabilities under one native platform.

Happy Holidays!