22 / 60
their age in a number of ways:
• They suffer from performance prob-
lems for cloud-based applications
that are difficult to ignore, affecting
both internal operations and cus-
tomer experience;
• They lead to frustratingly poor sound
quality for VoIP phone calls;
• They create delays and errors in
data backups;
• They are difficult and time-con-
suming to expand in order to add
more data capacity or connect out
to new branches and offices; and
• They have stunningly high mainte-
nance costs, as well as the cost of
supplemental connectivity servic-
es to make up for shortcomings.
Customers who are sick and tired
of those problems quickly go through
the five stages of grief and arrive at the
decision that they need to upgrade to
an SD-WAN, which is far better suited
to a cloud-based, mobile computing
world. Customers know they want an
SD-WAN, but they don’t want it to be
painful. And that is where oversimplifi-
cation becomes a temptation. That is a
danger for channel companies but also
an opportunity.
Customers want SD-WAN to be
simple, but as soon as they hear the
words “one size fits all,” they know
immediately that that is not the path
they want to go down. Too many
companies talk about SD-WAN as if
it’s just one thing, but it isn’t. There
are as many flavors of SD-WAN
implementations as there are compa-
nies that will use it. That is because
every SD-WAN needs to be custom-
ized to match a long list of character-
istics of the end-user company today,
and be designed to adapt to how the
company will grow over time. There
are common elements, of course,
but SD-WAN implementations are
all unique, because they have to be.
And customers will get that if you tell
them and back it up with examples.
Here are three quick examples to
illustrate why one-size-fits-all doesn’t
work when it comes to SD-WAN. Each
of these is an actual, mid-sized cus-
Virtual Realities
Using multiple last-mike services (MPLS, broadband, 4G/LTE)
66%
Link load balancing
61%
Central network policy creation, deployment and enforcement
60%
Policy-based routing by application type and link quality
54%
SLA-backed guarantee for network latency
54%
Packet loss elimination techniques such as forward error correction
54%
Deduplication and compression
45%
Source: Cato Networks; survey of 350 IT
professionals
Channel
Vision
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