Summary
This chapter covered a high-level overview of how the networks of today are causing challenges for businesses and their operations staff. The common business and IT trends the industry is seeing and how they impact the networks of today were also covered. The overall benefits desired by organizations and their IT staff lead to the need to rethink the WAN environment. Cloud applications and the influx of the amount of data within the network are causing strain on the WAN. This is causing businesses to look at ways to alleviate the pressure being put on the WAN and the organization as a whole. The use cases covered in this chapter will each be covered in depth in the upcoming chapters in this book. Cost is not the only driver for organizations to look at SD-WAN. Application performance, security, segmentation, improved user experience, redundancy, and resiliency are also key drivers that point to SD-WAN.