Comparing SD-WAN Vendors: Combining with a private WAN

Is your company researching SD-WAN, but you have both public Internet connections and a private WAN connection that you will be keeping?

Mike Smith explains if this is possible and how it will affect your search for the best SD-WAN solution.

Which SD-WAN vendors should your company be considering? Click below and ask Mike today.

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About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript

So your company is looking into SD-WAN. Maybe you have an existing MPLS network that you’re trying to replace. Maybe you want to augment that MPLS network. Maybe you, just for some reason, have heard of SD-WAN and are looking into it. All great reasons. But when it comes to SD-WAN, there’s a lot of different solutions out there. A lot of different vendors selling it. And each vendor has their niche. So one of the things you’ll see me talking about all the time is really narrowing down your SD-WAN requirements, because that will really narrow down the number of vendors you should look at. All vendors are not the same. They all do not offer the same solution. And if you start just calling random SD-WAN service providers, you’re going to end up with a lot of vendors who don’t fit your requirements.

So that being said, one of the requirements you want to think about is, are you looking to just use SD-WAN over your public internet connections? Or do you have an existing private network, private wider network connectivity solution that you’re trying to augment, or you’re trying to pair up with. So say for instance, you’ve got some private line circuits that you want to keep in place that are great solutions that are maybe linking one location to the next, and you don’t really want to get rid of those, but you still want to add SD-WAN and use that to help load balance between the private networking solution and the public internet for different applications.

So if you want to do that, there’s only certain SD-WAN service providers that will offer that. Most SD-WAN service providers will not basically allow you to plug in a private WAN circuit into their SD-WAN appliance and have it load balanced with a public internet circuit. That’s something most solutions won’t allow, but there are some great service providers that do that. So just something you want to keep in mind, if you have a private network currently, and you don’t necessarily want to get rid of it for maybe some of the sites do some of the sites don’t, but you still want to look into SD-WAN to maybe augment that solution.

Which service providers are out there, that’ll do the best job? Well, it depends on some of the requirements. What I’d suggest is just to call me (714-593-0011), or email me for that information. If you tell me your company’s requirements, I can probably give you a nice handful of SD-WAN service providers that you should be quoting. Don’t try to Google it. You’ll just spend hours on the internet and you’ll probably end up in the wrong place anyway. And using our company, doesn’t cost your company a dime no matter what. So definitely reach out. I’m happy to help answer questions you have and give you some recommendations on the right SD-WAN vendors for your business. I hope that helps a little bit. I’ll see you on the next video.