Jane Edwards
Don Parente, vice president of sales and solution architecture for the federal sector at MetTel, said a software-defined wide area network could serve as a revolutionary architecture that could enable federal agencies to deliver secure network connectivity to multiple sites.
SD-WAN “uses a centralized control plane to route traffic, allowing administrators to write rules and policies and deploy them across the entire network at once,” Parente wrote in a commentary published Monday in Nextgov/FCW.
“Control is detached from the underlying network, simplifying network management and improving cost, while maintaining high levels of performance,” he added.
According to Parente, SD-WAN could allow agencies to easily integrate access technologies into the network and “balance traffic across the multiple low-cost paths” while replacing their multiprotocol label switching WAN environment with multiple broadband carriers.
“If an agency is still feeling reluctant, they can ease into SD-WAN by augmenting their MPLS networks with low-cost internet connection,” he said.
The MetTel executive discussed how SD-WAN helped a major equipment rental company quickly respond and deploy critical equipment to support disaster recovery efforts in the state of Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian.
“While their initial focus was on replacing an expensive MPLS network with greater bandwidth at lower costs, the remarkable resilience of SD-WAN became the greatest benefit. From every metric perspective – performance, cost, resilience – SD-WAN has proven its merit as the network solution of the future,” Parente noted.
