The 4 Types of SD-WAN Solutions and Which is Best for Your Company

Your company is in the market for SD-WAN. Maybe you’re replacing your MPLS network, or maybe you’re replacing your existing SD-WAN network. What’s available in 2025, and which is best for your company?

In this video, I cover 4 types of SD-WAN solutions and explain which is best for your company.

Want my recommendations on the best SD-WAN vendors that your company should quote? Click the button below and ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

your companies in the market for a new sd-wan solution, maybe replacing an existing MPLS network, or maybe you’re replacing your existing SD-WAN solution that you’re not that happy with or you know that better stuff is available, but you’re asking yourself what are the best SD-WAN solutions out there in 2025? What are the different types of solutions? What should you be looking at? Well, my name is Mike Smith. I’m the president of Aero com. Let’s put our heads together on this.

My Recommendations

Hey, if you like a shortcut, reach out and contact me. If you’d like to know the best SD-WAN vendors that your company should be quoting. That’s my job. I’m a broker for all the major vendors out there. I will help your company make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. Reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). More information on that at the end of this video. But definitely reach out to me. If you’re shopping for this stuff, I will help you find the right vendors. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss any of my weekly videos that I put out. If you like the video. Hey, do me a favor. Hit the like button, ring the bell and leave me a comment down below.

4 Types of SD-WAN Solutions for your company

well, I’ve been selling SD-WAN really? Since it came out because I’ve been a broker in this industry for over 20 years. So. SD-WAN maybe came out, I don’t know, ten years ago or so. in 2025, my opinion is there’s really four main types of SD-WAN. Now there’s a lot of different nuances within those four types. And if you reach out and talk to me about your company, we can have a lot deeper conversation. But for the sake of making this video somewhat short, I’m going to tell you the main four types of SD-WAN I think there are, and which type might be best for your company.

1.On-Site: Hardware vs Software

The first type of SD-WAN are companies that offer on site appliances versus software based SD-WAN. Well, which one of those is better for your company? An easy way, you know, not getting too detailed. A quick way to know is that larger sites, usually you need an onsite appliance, really small sites or home based offices. You can get away with software based SD-WAN.

2. Cloud-Enabled vs On-Site only

The second big differentiator between SD-WAN types are cloud enabled SD-WAN solutions versus onsite only SD-WAN solutions. And there’s really I’d say there’s three reasons why a cloud enabled solution might be better for your company.

Number one is if your company has a critical onsite server that people are trying to access from outside of the organization, from outside of that site, from other sites or outside of the organization. So if that’s the case, a cloud enabled solution might be a better option because you can fail over inbound internet traffic on a cloud enabled solution.

The second reason is if your company is doing some heavy cloud applications, like you have some servers in the cloud that have huge workloads on them and you’re really looking to have express routes to those cloud applications. So that’s the second reason why you might want to look into a cloud enabled SD-WAN solution.

And the third is if your company is really trying to do some heavy when acceleration or when optimization over a private backbone, like, for instance, you have some global sites and you’re sending large files and you really want to increase the speed at which those files are coming through or decrease the latency. That’s another reason why you might want to look into a cloud enabled. SD One solution because those are the solutions that have. The next thing that I’m gonna talk to you about.

3. Backbone: WAN acceleration/optimization

Okay, so the third type of SD-WAN solution are SD-WAN vendors that have a private backbone network. And what these are these are cloud enabled. SD-WAN solutions that come back, their cloud pops with their own private IP fiber optic backbone. So when this would come into play is if like what I mentioned before, is if you really want to increase your when you want to have a project where you’re trying to increase when acceleration or when optimization, you want to decrease the latency between global sites, that’s when you really want to look into an SD-WAN vendor that can provide a backbone network, a private backbone, where that data is going to travel across and sort of having it all hit the public Internet

4. Security

and the fourth and last main type of SD-WAN solution out there are SD-WAN vendors that offer security. So some SD-WAN solutions provide no security at all. Some provide some basic stateful firewall security. And then but I would say the main two that have really come around in the past couple of years are SASE solutions. That’s SD-WAN vendors that are providing next gen security solutions and then CASB solutions and those are taking security even a step further, like doing things like MDR or managed SIM. So detection and response really going into deep cybersecurity for your organization. So Stassi and Cas B really start separating SD-WAN vendors,

What are the best SD-WAN solutions that your company should quote?

Well, those are the four main differentiators and four main types of SD-WAN that your company could purchase out there in 2025. Which one is the best for your business? You really want to know the best. There’s more questions than that. We’d have to talk about. Reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I’m a broker for all the major SD-WAN vendors out there. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years, ever since SD-WANs been built. I sold MPLS networks before that, so I really know the landscape and I really know which vendors your company should be courting. And based on a few questions I’ll ask you, I’ll tell you the small handful of vendors you should be courting and why. I’ll introduce you to the best salespeople. With those vendors will schedule some phone calls with them, or they can go through, explain their solution in depth. I’ll also oversee the coding process to make sure you get the best pricing available on the vendor of your choice. And the nice thing is, on top of all those benefits, I won’t charge your company a dime for my services. The reason why is because the SD, when vendors actually pay me my broker fee so your company doesn’t have to pay me anything for recommendation.

Reach out and contact me

So there’s no excuse not to at least reach out and see what my opinion is on this stuff. I might be able to help. In fact, I probably will be able to help quite a bit. I will help you make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. It’s the reason why I do these videos. I love talking about it, so don’t hesitate. Send me an email, give me a call. I would love to help you on this project. As always, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss any of my weekly videos that I put out. And if you like the video, hit the like button. Ring the bell. Leave me a comment down below. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for watching and I will catch you on the next one.