The March to WAN Acceleration: Why Organisations Should Avoid Putting Their Eggs In One Basket features in the Winter issue of GPSJ Magazine.
March 11, 2025
In this software-defined era there is a new type of Wide Area Network (WAN) – the SD-WAN. It’s described by World Wide Technology as “the next generation of WAN technology,” which forms the foundation of today’s WAN infrastructure. This is positive for industry overall, sinceorganisations often offer this as a service and it can be hosted in a multitude of locations – changing where applications are located.
With traditional network infrastructure, a hub-and-spoke approach is deployed, with organisations renting leased lines “from service providers, to interconnect remote locations or central data centre hubs,” explains the firm. It then explains that traffic flowed from a remote location (spoke) to a central hub in order to reach applications services and the public internet, provided from central locations. This network architectural model was favoured for years, as organisations became more interconnected, as services became highly centralised.
David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, comments: “Organisations in the past have used leased lines from service providers to connect remote locations to the data centre. Data traffic flowed to and from a remote location to a data centre to access applications and on to the public internet , typically provided from the Data Centre, all under Central control.”
Demand for infrastructure flexibility
He says this hub and spoke design became the model for years. However, he adds that “as organisations required more interconnected applications, such as the internet, this required more flexibility than the centralised services in a few core locations.”
So, applications nowadays – more often than not – exist outside of any centralised hub, and they may be stored in a multitude of locations. In contrast, the hub-and-spoke approach meant that applications were hosted in only a small number of locations. Cloud-based applications have also created the ‘as-a—service’ notion over the internet, while traditional WANs often foundered on performance bottlenecks – making it impossible for the new application models to work properly. This was often due to inefficient traffic flows through the central hub.
SD-WANs are tasked with solving these issues. There are four original core features of SD-WAN: Transport independence; application visibility; path intelligence; and centralised management. Vendors are also now touting some form of integration with artificial intelligence and machine learning to manage latency and packet loss. However, they aren’t fully automated, as most network management is still done manually. Integral security is another factor being promoted.
AI but not so automated
Trossell recently explained to The Stack that some large vendors use AI to “manage their machinery, taking a natural language to consider how to implement it.” He remarked that most devices use a specific AI language to create low-level commands. As for AI itself, he thinks everyone in networking has jumped on an AI bandwagon. He says he hasn’t seen anyone doing anything automatically:
“Everyone has jumped onto the AI bandwagon. I’ve not seen anyone doing anything automatically. I don’t think it takes control of the network switches, it’s more advisory, such as how engineers can change the network settings to improve performance, whereas we allow AI to manage the flow of data.”
“It’s down to organisations to find out how they are going to manage the network, but it won’t be self-configuring. Engineers will work on the feedback from the AI, and then they will need to find a solution. They have bolted things on rather than designing what they do from scratch. It’s 50 years of the network working, so how do you ditch it to become graphically orientated, so that it’s just a matter of click, click, click and it’s done.”
SD-WAN advantages
The key benefits of SD-WANs that are often promoted by their proponents include enhanced connectivity and reliability; increased bandwidth and efficiency; easier network management; improved cyber-security and protection; the ability to adapt to changing demand; increase flexibility; cost-savings; improved application and network performance; improved user experience and more uptime.
Trossell opines: “The beauty of SD-WAN is that it provides centralised management that allows for common templates to be developed based on site type, reducing the variations of configurations that were deployed in the WAN.” He comments that the days of configuring hundreds of routers using a CLI interface or visiting remote sites have disappeared. Central management tools allow for customisable automation that can be easily accessed using HTTP-based RESTful interactions over the same WAN.
SD-WAN disadvantages
However, they have several disadvantages. They include security vulnerabilities; difficulties in being able to monitor traffic flows; the complexity of being able to enforce consistent policies; the need for IT teams to have training in order to manage the complexities of SD-WANs to avoid configuration errors and packet loss. With SD-WANs, there are often upfront costs related to the implementation of new infrastructure; and an SD-WAN vendor or management model may not be appropriate for the needs of a particular purpose or organisation, leading to higher costs.
Trossell nevertheless recognises that they have changed Wide Area Networking over time. He explains: “The first generation of SD-WAN solutions provided a new way of providing a flexible range of features for WAN architecture, and so no longer did every bit of data but have to go via the data centre instead.” He says they provided the ability to create a virtual network – or overlay – on top of any service provider or connection, creating greater flexibility to introducing commodity connectivity, such as broadband access into remote locations.
WAN Acceleration overlay
However, despite the overwhelming support in industry for SD-WANs today, they often need a boost. He argues that, while SD-WANs provide the administrator with a whole range of facilities to manage how the data flows across physical networks, it does not sufficiently tackle latency and packet loss at higher bandwidths that SD-WANs are now reaching. This is despite them having a level of deduplication, or WAN optimisation built into SD-WAN products.
He elaborates – countering vendors’ claims that SD-WANs mitigate latency and packet loss: “When dealing with encrypted or previously compressed files formats, the SD-WAN cannot add to the performance of the data throughput. It is only with WAN Acceleration with its no touch data handling, along with data parallelisation, artificial intelligence and machine learning that we begin to see some useful data acceleration performance levels.”
“Adding a WAN Acceleration overlay to the SD-WAN configuration can maximise the throughput over the defined WAN. Some customers have seen 50 times the improvement over long distances.” He believes that the additional performance given by WAN Acceleration shows that organisations shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket when it comes to the need to improve data flows, network management and achieve higher performance.
Much depends on the speed of the WAN. Proofs of concept can show whether a WAN or an SD-WAN can benefit from WAN Acceleration by adding to the data flow. “Slow protocols such as live video and voice are not suitable for WAN Acceleration, as there is not enough data available for the AI to work effectively,” he explains.
Other reasons for avoiding putting all of one’s eggs in a basket include vendor lock-ins, the lack of ability to complete automate network management and network administration – including in the mitigation of latency and packet loss. So, organisations shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket – at Easter or at any time of the year – particularly because WAN Acceleration has a track record with organisations, such as Investec Private Bank, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US, of overcoming connectivity challenges and improving overall network resilience without the need to invest in new infrastructure or to add additional bandwidth.
Click here to read the article on GPSJ (Government Public Sector Journal). Pg 38-39
