Once you have made a good business case for SD-WAN, then you are ready to take the leap forward. You have to convert your motivation into technical requirements. After all, SD-WAN is a technology play in addition to cost savings. As a network manager or an architect, you have to pick the best technology that’s affordable and meets your business requirements and design goals.

SD-WAN is a hot space and as a result, it’s saturated with vendors. It’s practically impossible to talk to each vendor, learn about their offerings, and test their products in your network. So how do you differentiate between the “good” and the “best”? First, do some research to narrow down the list of SD-WAN vendors, and look for ones that have many customers with sizable deployments. Vendors with successful customer deployments have their product and their code baked in, which means that there’s less chance of encountering a bug that’s not known to the vendor. That means less risk of network downtime, which is critical since network availability is an important factor for running the business smoothly. However, if you have risk-taking appetite, then you should explore new vendors too.

As you shortlist your vendors, you need to make a couple of key decisions that will be important for your SD-WAN proof of concept: Placement of SD-WAN controllers and the edge routers. This needs to be decided before you can proceed to technical requirements. If all this sounds interesting then check out my blog that was published in Network Computing at http://www.networkcomputing.com/cloud-infrastructure/sd-wan-controller-and-router-placement/1017839812