How to realize networking with SD-WAN technology when enterprises have many branches?

With the development and growth of enterprises, the increase of branches is inevitable. When there are more and more branches, how to interconnect them becomes an urgent problem.

Enterprise multi-branch networking, simply put, is the enterprise's multiple branches through the virtual private network technology, based on the Internet network, private network interconnection.

Today we will take a manufacturing enterprise as an example to understand the evolution of multi-branch networking technology.

Traditional IPSec Networking

A manufacturing company has a small number of employees at the beginning of its development, and there are not many branches. Restricted by the objective conditions, the actual use of the company's headquarters and branches through the point-to-multipoint IPSec interoperability, as the end of the last century the rise of the IPSec technology, it is more secure, but there are also complex configuration, installation and maintenance difficulties and other defects. When there are fewer branches, it can still cope with it, but once the number of branches increases, IPSec is difficult to meet the demand.

A manufacturing company has grown in size and scale, and therefore has higher requirements for network organization. SD-WAN is an extension of traditional IPSec networking, and tunnels are established between CPEs at the edges of each of the company's sites, so that the company's network is completely on top of the network provided by the service provider.

Relative to traditional networking, SD-WAN brings several advantages:

Introduces the role of a controller for CPE discovery and management, and dynamically sends down to it information used to establish tunnels, as well as routing information needed for networking, greatly improving configuration efficiency. WAN link monitoring is added to optimize route selection and link failover.

The SD-WAN solution idea is to leverage existing networks and focus on last-mile access, optimization, and management. The specific implementation plan is usually to establish POP points in each backbone node, deploy SD-WAN gateway equipment, and access the SD-WAN private network.