Today's Top WAN Issues and How to Solve Them - Part 2

The top SD-WAN implantation challenges IT professionals experience today
Jay Botelho
Learn more about BlueCat Networks

In Part 1 of this series, we explored the top pain points associated with managing Internet-based WANs today. This second installment will focus on today's most prevalent SD-WAN deployment challenges specifically and what you can do to better manage modern WANs overall.

Start with Today's Top WAN Issues and How to Solve Them - Part 1

Many organizations flock to SD-WAN to realize potential network performance, security and cost reduction benefits. But according to recent research from EMA, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Here are several of the top SD-WAN implantation challenges IT professionals experience today:

1. Implementation Complexity

More than 40% of organizations identify implementation complexity as a top hurdle to SD-WAN success. Most organizations introduce public Internet options into their SD-WAN, and these increase complexity for many of the reasons highlighted in Part 1 of this series, but also because they require additional security technologies that IT teams aren't as accustomed to managing.

Additionally, you need to integrate SD-WANs with existing network elements, which can account for additional complexity and the need for in-depth programming and scripting expertise. SD-WAN success demands a detailed set of expectations for what the solutions should achieve concerning performance, security and cost, as well as a clear accounting of all the existing elements in your network.

Assembling this information and establishing an exhaustive integration plan is the only way to manage the inherent complexity of a new SD-WAN deployment (and avoid cost overruns and frustration).

2. Integration with Existing Network Technology

SD-WANs are essentially just an overlay on top of your existing network, which many take to mean they're simple to deploy. But, nearly 40% of IT professionals cited integration with current network technology as a significant SD-WAN roadblock. As the name implies, "soft-defined" means this software must communicate with all your existing hardware and software network components — something far easier said than done.

Are you doing the integration or is the SD-WAN vendor?

What existing network elements will be the most challenging?

What skills are required?

SD-WAN is a relatively new technology, so if you have some older components in your network, compatibility with this new SD-WAN technology could be an issue or drive up the solution's cost.

For example, say you have your entire SD-WAN project scoped out, including integration costs, and you're ready to go. Then you realize you have some fairly old switches in your stack that you didn't realize don't integrate properly with your chosen SD-WAN solution. Without the proper visibility, tools and planning, it's easy to miss certain points of integration and run into time-consuming obstacles and budget overages.

3. Network Team Skills Gaps

Roughly 22% of organizations believe skills deficits within their network team are impeding progress on SD-WAN deployment projects. These issues can quickly become apparent when organizations decide to forgo the help of an SD-WAN vendor and perform the integration for a new rollout internally in the interest of saving money.

As teams begin digging into these projects, they often realize SD-WAN integrations are not as "plug-and-play" as vendors typically advertise. SD-WAN deployments require skillsets that might be in short supply within most NetOps teams. Whether it's a lack of familiarity with security solutions and procedures, software development and scripting expertise, or experience troubleshooting issues at ISPs, you're sure to experience schedule delays and cost increases as the team learns on the job or brings in a third party to help.

The Power of End-to-End Network Visibility

When asked to identify the top root causes of WAN issues today, 30% of organizations listed application errors and performance, while 30% cited ISP or MPLS providers, and 28% listed end-user error or client device failure. Establishing comprehensive network visibility is the key to addressing these issues, and managing and optimizing your modern WAN.

Distributed organizations such as retailer chains and healthcare branches need end-to-end network visibility to identify application performance issues such as intermittent asymmetric VoIP routing issues, poor traffic flows from branches to the data center, and WAN application traffic steering problems.

Flow-based network analysis can help perform real-time network topology mapping for devices, interfaces, applications, VPNs and users. It can also help establish critical baselines for SD-WAN deployments, such as site-to-site traffic types and paths, application behaviors and consumption patterns, and more.

These are just a few examples that illustrate why your team must establish end-to-end network visibility in order to address today's hybrid WAN challenges and their root causes. This means leveraging modern network monitoring solutions to collect and analyze disparate data sources, including network flow data, packet data, device metrics, active monitoring data, endpoint data, and cloud provider flow data. Hybrid WANs are here to stay, and the common issues associated with them will be too unless you're equipped to visualize and manage every domain and element of your network.

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Today's Top WAN Issues and How to Solve Them - Part 2

The top SD-WAN implantation challenges IT professionals experience today
Jay Botelho
Learn more about BlueCat Networks

In Part 1 of this series, we explored the top pain points associated with managing Internet-based WANs today. This second installment will focus on today's most prevalent SD-WAN deployment challenges specifically and what you can do to better manage modern WANs overall.

Start with Today's Top WAN Issues and How to Solve Them - Part 1

Many organizations flock to SD-WAN to realize potential network performance, security and cost reduction benefits. But according to recent research from EMA, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Here are several of the top SD-WAN implantation challenges IT professionals experience today:

1. Implementation Complexity

More than 40% of organizations identify implementation complexity as a top hurdle to SD-WAN success. Most organizations introduce public Internet options into their SD-WAN, and these increase complexity for many of the reasons highlighted in Part 1 of this series, but also because they require additional security technologies that IT teams aren't as accustomed to managing.

Additionally, you need to integrate SD-WANs with existing network elements, which can account for additional complexity and the need for in-depth programming and scripting expertise. SD-WAN success demands a detailed set of expectations for what the solutions should achieve concerning performance, security and cost, as well as a clear accounting of all the existing elements in your network.

Assembling this information and establishing an exhaustive integration plan is the only way to manage the inherent complexity of a new SD-WAN deployment (and avoid cost overruns and frustration).

2. Integration with Existing Network Technology

SD-WANs are essentially just an overlay on top of your existing network, which many take to mean they're simple to deploy. But, nearly 40% of IT professionals cited integration with current network technology as a significant SD-WAN roadblock. As the name implies, "soft-defined" means this software must communicate with all your existing hardware and software network components — something far easier said than done.

Are you doing the integration or is the SD-WAN vendor?

What existing network elements will be the most challenging?

What skills are required?

SD-WAN is a relatively new technology, so if you have some older components in your network, compatibility with this new SD-WAN technology could be an issue or drive up the solution's cost.

For example, say you have your entire SD-WAN project scoped out, including integration costs, and you're ready to go. Then you realize you have some fairly old switches in your stack that you didn't realize don't integrate properly with your chosen SD-WAN solution. Without the proper visibility, tools and planning, it's easy to miss certain points of integration and run into time-consuming obstacles and budget overages.

3. Network Team Skills Gaps

Roughly 22% of organizations believe skills deficits within their network team are impeding progress on SD-WAN deployment projects. These issues can quickly become apparent when organizations decide to forgo the help of an SD-WAN vendor and perform the integration for a new rollout internally in the interest of saving money.

As teams begin digging into these projects, they often realize SD-WAN integrations are not as "plug-and-play" as vendors typically advertise. SD-WAN deployments require skillsets that might be in short supply within most NetOps teams. Whether it's a lack of familiarity with security solutions and procedures, software development and scripting expertise, or experience troubleshooting issues at ISPs, you're sure to experience schedule delays and cost increases as the team learns on the job or brings in a third party to help.

The Power of End-to-End Network Visibility

When asked to identify the top root causes of WAN issues today, 30% of organizations listed application errors and performance, while 30% cited ISP or MPLS providers, and 28% listed end-user error or client device failure. Establishing comprehensive network visibility is the key to addressing these issues, and managing and optimizing your modern WAN.

Distributed organizations such as retailer chains and healthcare branches need end-to-end network visibility to identify application performance issues such as intermittent asymmetric VoIP routing issues, poor traffic flows from branches to the data center, and WAN application traffic steering problems.

Flow-based network analysis can help perform real-time network topology mapping for devices, interfaces, applications, VPNs and users. It can also help establish critical baselines for SD-WAN deployments, such as site-to-site traffic types and paths, application behaviors and consumption patterns, and more.

These are just a few examples that illustrate why your team must establish end-to-end network visibility in order to address today's hybrid WAN challenges and their root causes. This means leveraging modern network monitoring solutions to collect and analyze disparate data sources, including network flow data, packet data, device metrics, active monitoring data, endpoint data, and cloud provider flow data. Hybrid WANs are here to stay, and the common issues associated with them will be too unless you're equipped to visualize and manage every domain and element of your network.

Related Links

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How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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