What Is SD-WAN and Why Organizations Are Making The Switch To It

Steven Vargas • October 26, 2001
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In 2019, it became clear that SD-WAN had secured its position as the way forward for enterprise WAN connectivity. Market adoption is growing rapidly, and industry experts have declared a winner in the SD-WAN vs MPLS debate. For example, Network World called 2018 the year of SD-WAN, and before the end of Q3 2018 Gartner declared SD-WAN is killing MPLS.


Times have changed, and enterprises are using the cloud and subscribing to software-as-a-service (SaaS). While users traditionally connected back to the corporate data center to access business applications, they are now accessing those same applications in the cloud.


As a result, the traditional WAN is no longer suitable mainly because backhauling all traffic – including that destined to the cloud – from branch offices to the headquarters introduces latency and impairs application performance. SD-WAN provides WAN simplification, lower costs, bandwidth efficiency and a seamless on-ramp to the cloud with significant application performance especially for critical applications without sacrificing security and data privacy.


SO WHAT IS SD-WAN?


Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) brings the abstraction of SDN to the WAN; however, it is only the latest in a series of transformations of WAN. The very first stage of WAN, in the 1980s, used point-to-point (PPP) lines to connect different LANs. The price and efficiency of these connections were improved with the introduction of Frame Relay in the early 1990s. Instead of requiring a direct PPP connection between each pair of communicating parties, Frame Relay allowed connection to a “cloud” from a service provider, allowing shared last-mile link bandwidth and the use of less expensive router hardware. The next stage was the introduction of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), which provided an IP-based means of carrying voice, video, and data on the same network. MPLS provides dependable network connections protected by SLAs but is expensive and slow to provision. In 2013, SD-WAN emerged, showing the potential to be a viable and cost-effective alternative to MPLS – making it the logical next step in WAN technology. By abstracting away, the network layer and routing traffic based upon a collection of centrally defined and managed policies, SD-WAN can optimize routing and prioritization of various types of application traffic. The flexibility provided by SD-WAN also allows it to better meet the needs of cloud and mobile users. As this type of use is becoming more common, it is unsurprising that many organizations are anticipated to adopt SD-WAN.


What’s driving all the excitement around SD-WAN? It effectively comes down to this: SD-WAN is more cost-effective and operationally agile than MPLS. SD-WAN reduces capex and opex while also simplifying WAN management and scalability. However, if you do look beyond the high-level conclusions, it can be hard to quantify how SD-WAN will matter for your business.


Interested in learning more? Stay tuned for the top 5 benefits of SD-WAN and why IT professionals and industry experts alike see it as the future for enterprises.

AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025
October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)

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