With proper planning, mission critical backups can be done in multiple locations on a daily basis with a WAN. Those locations can be as geographically diverse as possible. This is built-in insurance for all your valuable data in case of any sudden attacks as well as for natural disasters.

Another great feature of modern WAN solutions is the options in levels of bandwidth that are available. A typical low-end WAN can handle up to 1 Mbps. At the high-end a more expensive WAN can sometimes handle up to 10 Gbps. Along with options in data pipe size is the option of setting multiple QoS priorities for different priorities of data traffic according to a business’s operational priorities. For instance, worker emails might be set in a QoS table to be lowest priority, while company bank transfers or Accounts Receivable documents are transferred with very high priority.

The ways WANs are implemented have significantly changed over the decades. Originally, most WANs were done with expensive T1 telephone system data links. Later, DSL became a more economical way to facilitate communications. Today, most private WANs are implemented over channels in extremely fast fiber optic networks, to which most of the Internet has now also upgraded. This has reduced the overall cost per megabyte of data transfer and also enabled high-tech applications, such as conference video arenas, broadcast private video, and Internet radio stations. So in a very real sense, it is the advent of the WAN that has brought what used to be considered science fiction fantasy to real life.

All these innovations are adding up to what some have termed the Software-Defined Enterprise (SDE), which is a super-set of the enterprise level WAN and the modern Data Center. A lot of progress has been made with Software-defined Data Centers (SDDCs), and SD-WANs have been the one major innovation that has led to a true SDE solution architecture. It is the SD-WAN technologies that bring Data Center features and benefits out of the corporate environment and into the lives of everyday users of cloud accounts. This includes dramatically reduced hardware costs, quick over-the-network provisioning and administration, and the rise of application policy for simple SLA style agreements.

On the horizon we now see Instant On (ION) provisioning and deployment. What used to take days and weeks to be installed and setup in a new office, along with provisions for security, connectivity, QoS settings, and internal monitoring applications is now automatically available, remotely through cloud implementations of SD-WANs. So, now all that overhead is already taken care of in the cloud and the resulting reduction in complexity means a new office can literally be setup in a matter of minutes!