Traditional WAN vs. SD-WAN

Traditional WAN, especially MPLS, requires a single provider to access many sites. Most often, this provider is “white labeling” or reselling the services of other providers native to your branch locations. This is called a Type 2 circuit and only adds unnecessary costs to your WAN.

Traditional WAN does not allow for branches to have direct access to cloud resources using a “hub and spoke” network design. Traffic backhauled through the datacenter carries heavy performance penalties. This is one of the major disadvantage of traditional WAN.

An MPLS network creates a single point of failure in your network and makes it very difficult to allow for a failover solution of equal performance and security without a highly expensive and complex solution.

Another drawback in traditional WAN is application traffic over internet connections lacks SLAs and the reliability needed by users. Prioritizing data over VPN between branches is difficult and causes performance challenges of key applications such as voice and video.