The use of SD-WAN provides an opportunity to reduce the monthly recurring cost of more expensive telecommunication services, such as MPLS, used to connect sites while maintaining performance expectations. It is possible for an SD-WAN solution, composing of lower-cost consumer Internet services, to outperform more expensive dedicated circuits due to the agility and automatic tuning the vendors’ solution offers.

An overview video of a leading SD-WAN solution can be viewed here.

A few of the key features of SD-WAN are:

Fault tolerant WAN or Internet operation. Provides seamless transition during circuit issues since traffic flows are uninterrupted by the failure or degradation of one of the aggregated connections.
Simplifies the network. Eliminates additional equipment and configurations required to achieve redundancy by abstracting the configuration away from the perimeter. The use of “same IP failover” eliminates the need to implement additional failover mechanisms, such as firewall-level failover or Failover DNS, since the IP addresses configured on the perimeter do not change.
Optimizes the performance of the network. Provides for the use of both circuits for load balancing and increasing aggregate throughput. Leverages traffic shaping and Quality of Service (QoS) adaptation of critical traffic to improve end-user experiences. May provide a direct peering directly to leading Cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure and AWS, to increase performance and security.
Simplifies change management. Internet connections can be added or removed from the SD-WAN router without changing the IP addressing the customer uses. This reduces the amount of changes required when switching ISPs delivering a higher degree of continuity with Internet-connected services.