“ngena is today already providing next generation SD-WAN services”
Bart de Graaff
CEO of ngena
Bart de Graaff
CEO of ngena
ngena is following an holistic approach of a Connectivity Platform as a Service in order to keep networks up to date in a technology environment of constant change. ngena’s uniqueness lies in enabling companies digital transformation with speed, agility and the latest, innovative application services.
The following products help enterprise customers as standalone or in combination to tailor a solution for simple as well as complex network requirements:
Secure and simple cloud-based management of entire networks
Solution for complex networks
Cost-effective solution for a combination of simple and complex networks to expand
Provides the enterprise experience directly to the remote workforce
Fully integrated value-added services
A new era of digital marketing at the point of sales for tailored, on-time customer communication and campaigns
SDN is an abbreviation for “Software-Defined Networking” and describes a network technology that uses software instead of hardware components to configure and run a wide range of network-relevant settings centrally (e.g. via a software portal). This approach is contrasting starkly with past practices where this was done using hardware components.
As a conclusion, an SD-WAN is an abbreviation for “Software-Defined Wide Area Network”, in other words: a WAN that is controlled by means of software.
Today, ever more companies are interested in interconnecting their worldwide sites over an SD-WAN. Why? The increasing use of Cloud services, fundamental changes in user behaviour – such as working from home offices – and growing bandwidth requirements are necessitating revolutionary network topologies, which SD-WANs can offer. See the infographic for more information.
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SD-WANs are operated as a virtual overlay that is situated above the pure network-connection level (the underlay generally being the Internet, Ethernet or MPLS transport technology) and can be programmed using SDN (= Software-Defined Networking).
The key difference to conventional MPLS-based Wide Area Networks is that SD-WANs strictly separate the data plane (which transports the actual data) and control plane (which is responsible for controlling the communication, e.g. routing policies).
With SDN, software is used to manage routing and network-management information, for instance, or to configure security policies. The centralized software-control mechanisms ensure flexible structures that allow new connections to be added, or existing ones to be altered, with a minimum of effort.
Other network functions, too – such as network monitoring and analytics, WAN acceleration and security functions such as e.g. firewalls – can be realized in the form of software applications, and thereby replace a large number of costly hardware-based functions.
In this way, SDN technology enables flexible network structures that allow the WAN traffic and connections to be optimized in terms of cost, load distribution and data security.
At the same time, network and application quality can be improved by avoiding overloads, and minimizing delays and packet losses.
SDN technology will not only give you greater flexibility in deploying and running global networks. It will also help you to cut costs by:
Within the networks, data traffic is optimized using functions such as “Application Aware Routing”, which categorizes data in application classes and preferentially transports business-critical applications.
Combining several transmission technologies and prioritizing the application classes makes it possible to ensure fault-free data flows, high transmission quality and economic efficiency – with the associated high level of customer satisfaction.
And even compared to a) SD-WAN deployments run in a Do-it-yourself approach or b) other managed SD-WAN service providers solutions that are out on the market, ngena’s fully-managed service is superior, as it offers an end-to-end automation and a central orchestration of the entire solution that make manual processes unnecessary and the roll-out of new sites or new network functions much more efficient and leaner.
Compared to classical network technologies like MPLS or Internet VPNs, ngena’s SD-WAN approach offers a wide range of advantages, as it can be deployed in a hybrid mode via the shared infrastructure of the ngena alliance partners. See the infographic for more information.
If you’d like to learn more about Software-Defined Networking, and how ngena can offer you a more flexible, performant and cost-effective enterprise-grade global network, why not contact us to arrange a meeting?