SD-WAN matures but tackling performance challenges is next for managed service providers

New Heavy Reading in-depth research surveys over 100 service providers globally on how they are building and managing their SD-WAN services, where they are facing challenges, and where they see an opportunity for differentiation. Here’s a first look at what they had to say.

Service providers have a love-hate relationship with SD-WAN. The market push from enterprises and vendors for cost-effective, efficient and secure SD-WAN services on one hand versus the fear of cannibalization of high value network services such as MPLS. Service providers now agree that SD-WAN has, to a large extent, been additive to MPLS services which have started a slow, gradual decline. Their focus now is on attracting enterprises to move from DIY SD-WAN to managed SD-WAN services. The opportunity for service providers is to prove their value in managing secure wide area network services and application performance for enterprises across their estate and cloud and on-premise workloads.

Managed SD-WAN growing pains

What are your three biggest challenges when delivering SD-WAN as a managed service?

The biggest challenge for two-thirds of service providers surveyed is the value proposition itself of managing hybrid network performance across MPLS, SD-WAN, and Internet VPNs. The challenge level increases to 71% among the largest service providers (with over $5 billion in revenue) that typically serve large enterprise and multinationals. More than 60% of these large service providers say correlating events across underlay and overlay networks is a challenge.

SD-WAN is positioned as a single service, but in reality, it sits over multiple networks domains. The beauty of SD-WAN as an overlay network makes it flexible in combining bandwidth and optimizing network routes, but also masks the biggest challenge of managing performance across multiple transport networks (including third-party networks).

Additional stand-out points of the research include:

• More than 60% of service providers use 3 or more different management tools to manage SD-WAN services, with 16% using 5 or more tools. The dynamic open nature of the promise of SD-WAN comes with its own set of challenges.
• Performance monitoring of the underlay network – the thorn in the side of many an SP – heads the list in terms of priority for automation.

Stand out in the crowd – differentiate your managed SD-WAN performance

SLA verification is the second biggest SD-WAN challenge for 62% of service providers (see above graph). In order to meet SLAs, you need to verify performance and commit to competitive network availability, latency and mean time to fix SLAs. 

When you run SD-WAN across multiple technologies, and even third-party providers, it becomes a challenge to commit to a common SLA. No one wants to have 10 different ways to provide SLAs. 

This also ties into the ability to do “new service verification” and support zero-touch provisioning, which is a challenge for nearly half of service providers. Once again, SD-WAN is a single service that rides on different technologies, which means different work groups. The ability to coordinate and automate new service verification can be an issue when working across silos. The goal here is to be able to automate and remotely solve issues, avoiding costs associated with unnecessary truck rolls.

Another critical area is performance troubleshooting and being to be able to understand the relationships between network domains and monitor and correlate events in order to quickly identify and fix issues when they arise (or even before they arise with predictive analytics!).

Key takeaways to optimize SD-WAN managed services

A common theme across the challenges is how to break down domain silos and create a uniform view of network services performance.

• Throughout the survey, the difficulty of unified management of the overlay and the underlay, root cause analysis, and problem resolution of the combined overlay and underlay network emerged as a significant issue.
• SD-WAN is an over-the-top overlay network that still depends on a high-quality physical underlay network. Degradations and delays in the physical network layers also need to be monitored, correlated, and analyzed for complete visibility and troubleshooting. An analytics-driven approach to SD-WAN network management will increase reliability and fault prediction.
• SD-WAN vendors provide a good base of tools, but depending on vendors and offerings, there can be gaps.
• There may not be a single magic tool out of the box. Plan an architecture that leverages and supports the integration of best of breed tools and systems. This allows tools to come and go, without significantly changing process behavior.
• Key areas where third-party tools add value to SD-WAN services include:
  • Active performance monitoring on the transport layer
    • Granularity
    • Network segmentation
  • Analytics and correlation engine – supports any time-series data, open APIs with flexible metadata
  • Topology – a critical component to managing an SD-WAN service
  • Security – security firewalls, behavior-based intrusion detection, secure access service edge platform
• Managing the service and related tools requires a platform(s) developed to support DevOps engineers, with publicly available APIs, a standards-based architecture, cloud native microservices and support for flexible metadata and real-time data streaming.
• Last, not because it is least important, but because it is dependent on the resolution of the challenges mentioned above, integrating management of the overlay and the underlay and accelerating automation.

Many customers buy multiple managed services from the same SP – MPLS, SD-WAN, security, VoIP services. The SPs offer single sign-on portals that provide visibility into all services purchased by the enterprise, including the SD-WAN overlay.

However, the utility of these portals can be greatly enhanced if SPs provide SLA reporting that encompasses the underlay network, as well as the overlay, and enable active monitoring of the network, in addition to passive monitoring, to determine current service availability or response time. By doing so, they enable real-time troubleshooting and network optimization. These capabilities can transform the utility of a customer portal and be a significant differentiator for the SP.

Where are service providers encountering challenges with SD-WAN? Accedian has worked with Heavy Reading to understand service providers’ plans for managed SDWAN services – the drivers, challenges, and inhibitors. Watch the webinar to see the highlights of Heavy Reading’s Q4 2020 global survey, or download the complimentary research report here.