Unleashing the Power of SD-WAN in IoT

By CIOReview | Tuesday, March 20, 2018

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IoT has undoubtedly been a buzzword in recent times with several organizations—large enterprises and the startups alike—working on projects relating to smart cities, connected cars, and smart homes. Even enterprises are transforming their environments using IoT to automate their operations for greater process efficiency. However, not all IoT-related projects have been successful, despite system architects having come up with state-of-the-art designs. One of the reasons for the failure of IoT-related projects is the inadequate focus on underlying networks for routing the data between systems to enable seamless transfer of data between systems.

Typically, IoT systems involve a central repository to which all the data is routed, analyzed, and re-routed to different modules in the system. IoT systems require real-time communication, which the traditional wide area networks (WANs) are not capable of supporting. The systems demand a more efficient technology such as the software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), where two or more networks are combined using technologies like artificial intelligence to route data through an optimized path. Network administrators could use multiple strategies to connect the remote IoT sensors and centralized IoT repository, which helps in identifying critical data through the network and configure it to take an optimized path to its destination.

SD-WAN’s proven capability to choose the best path for the data has helped companies shun the expensive multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). Further, SD-WAN helps avoid the congestion outages in WAN allowing data to move toward the destination without any interruption. Therefore, in addition to being highly efficient, SD-WANs also prove to be highly economical for IoT systems.