Cost reduction has always been touted as one of SD-WAN’s great benefits, with the technology’s most ardent evangelists claiming companies can cut networking costs by 50 percent or more by using commodity broadband Internet connections instead of expensive MPLS circuits. Of course, your mileage may vary.
The ongoing transition to hybrid work has changed network usage patterns in ways that push legacy wide-area network (WAN) architectures to their limits. Decades-old network architectures designed chiefly to support email and web browsing simply can’t handle the rigorous remote access and cloud connectivity demands of today’s highly distributed workforces.