The SD-WAN architecture model is similar to SDN in many ways.
- Centralized management or coordination: Control plane
- Distributed Data Transfer Function – Data Plane
- Application-driven traffic routing policy
SD-WAN, like SDN solutions, does not support interoperability between vendors. However, working groups from various industries in SDN and SD-WAN continue to propose and discuss the establishment of industry standards.
SD-WAN provides value to businesses of all sizes
SD-WAN vendors have focused on providing a productivity-enhancing WAN and have provided value to businesses of all sizes. Efforts to address SD-WAN interoperability focused on working with existing WAN infrastructure such as routers, firewalls, and forwarding services rather than multi-vendor SD-WAN solutions.
SD-WAN Achieves Visible ROI
SD-WAN is rapidly being adopted in the production environment of enterprises, regardless of industry or scale, because it can achieve a visible return on investment (ROI) that can be easily achieved. As of late 2018, SD-WAN has gone beyond the early adopter market approval stage to the early majority stage, with SD-WAN deployed in more than 10,000 production environments across the industry.